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Owen Davies

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Grimoires

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Grimoires

A HISTORY OF MAGIC BOOKS

Owen Davies

OXPORD

UNIVERSITY PRESS

OXFORD

UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Acknowledgements

My parents, brother, sister, and Celine have been as supportive as ever in the
writing and researching of this book. My mother and her sister also helped with
translation. Thanks also to the following for their interest and advice or for
providing sources and generously answering my queries: Willem de Blecourt,
Ronald Hutton, David Lederer, Dave Evans, Soili-Maria Olli, Manfred Tschai-
kner, Caroline Oates, Francesca Matteoni, Steven Wood, Matthew Green, Row-
land Hughes, Stephan Bachter, Eva Pocs, Lisa Tallis, Jason Semmens, Laura Stark,
Maria Tausiet, Hugh Sadleir, Johanna Jacobsen, Benedek Lang, Helen Boak,
Enrique Perdiguero, Ane Ohrvik, Cecile Dubuis, and Tom Johnson. In collecting
the source materials for this book I particularly appreciated the helpfulness of
Jacques Pons (Archives Departementales des Landes), Evelyne Bacardatz (Arch-
ives de Bayonne), and Simone Shepherd (ACIJ publications officer). I am also
thankful for the valuable comments on an early typescript of the book provided by
my publisher's anonymous reviewer, and for the patience and suggestions of my
editors at Oxford University Press, Luciana O'Flaherty and Matthew Cotton.

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Contents

List of Illustrations ix

List of Plates xi

Introduction I

1 . Ancient and Medieval Grimoires 6

2. The War against Magic 44

3. Enlightenment and Treasure 93

4. Across the Oceans 139

5. Rediscovering Ancient Magic 168

6. Grimoires USA 189

7. Pulp Magic 232

8. Lovecraft, Satan, and Shadows 262

Epilogue 278

Picture Acknowledgements 284

Further Reading 285

Notes 291

Index 351

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List of Illustrations

i . Dr Faustus depicted in seventeenth-century literature 49

2. First English edition of the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy 51

3. Notebook of the early eighteenth-century Yorkshire cunning-man
Timothy Crowther, containing a mix of conjurations, axioms, weather-signs

and astrological calculations 58

4. Edition of Le Petit Albert, title page 99

5. Les veritahles clavicules de Salomon. Eighteenth-century manuscript 102

6. Le grand grimoire. Eighteenth-century imprint 103

7. List of devils and spirits from Le dragon rouge (early nineteenth-century edition) 105

8. D. Faust's original geister commando (c.1775) — frontispiece and title page 122

9. Title page from a late eighteenth-century Latin Cyprianus entitled the 'key of

hell or white and black magic' 125

10. Prophetesses and Cyprianus' Big Dream Book. A nineteenth-century Danish
divination manual 127

11. Page from the Danish cunning-man Anders Ulfkjser's Cyprianus. 130
(Reprinted from H.P. Hansen, Kloge Folk (Copenhagen, 1961), vol. 2, plate 3.

See Plate 9 in this book.)

12. A magician at work. From the Conjurors Magazine (1792—3) 133

13. Manuscript title page of Francis Barrett's The Magus (1801) 136

14. Title page of Gamle Richards Swartkonst-hok (Karlshamn, 1832) 142

15. Reginald Scot, The Discovery of Witchcraft (London, 1665) 151

16. A prayer to recite before reading the books or using the pentacles of

Abbe Julio. A single sheet sold separately from his books. 186

17. Title page of John George Hohman's The Long Lost Friend 193

18. Charms in John George Hohman's The Long Lost Friend 196

19. Purported portrait of Charles W. Roback looking suspiciously like a
seventeenth-century astrologer 203

20. Talismans from an early twentieth-century pulp edition of the Sixth and

Seventh Books of Moses 208

21. One of many puffs in the De Laurence's Catalog (Chicago, 1940) 221

22. Delaurence advertisement in The Daily Gleaner, 30 August 1939 228

23. Seals from an early-twentieth-century pulp edition of the Sixth and

Seventh Books of Moses 235

x I List of Illustrations

24. Black Herman: Secrets of Magic-Mystery and Legerdemain 237

25. La Magia Suprema Negra (19 16) 244

26. The 1950 Planet-Verlag edition of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses 255

27. Sigil of Baphomet from Stanislas de Guaita's La Clef de la Magie Noire (1897) 276

List of Plates

i . Coptic papyrus magical handbook, containing recipes for sexual problems

2. The magician Zoroaster conjuring up two demons. From a copy of
Le Livre du Tresor by Brunetto Latini (1425)

3. King Solomon reading the Torah (c.1280)

4. Moses and Aaron at Pharaoh's court (c.1300)

5. Conjuring demons to bring treasure. Cotton MS Tiberius (fourteenth century)

6. Preaching before Pope Honorius III. Giotto (c. 1295)

7. Elizabethan grimoire that borrows from the Key of Solomon, and which
purports to contain the magic of Roger Bacon

8. Manuscript of Bartie Patersoune, a Scottish cunning-man executed in 1607

9. The Danish cunning-man Anders Ulfkjaer, and his wife Mariane. Ulfkjasr
owned and used a manuscript Cyprianus.

10. The defendants in the murder of Nelson D. Rehmeyer and images from the
Sixth and Seventh books of Moses

1 1 . Pulp grimoires for sale

12. Book display in the Hindu Mysterious Store, Harlem, photographed in 1943

13. The Hindu Mysterious Store in Harlem photographed in 1943

14. Putumayo herbalist's stall, Colombia

15. Johann Kruse, the German campaigner against magical practitioners and
grimoires

16. A French copy of the Agrippa Noir belonging to the Basque conjurer
Gracien Detcheverry. The original was publicly burned in Bayonne in 1750

17. A Devil's pact written in a copy of the Grand grimoire sold by the
eighteenth-century Genevan grimoire dealer Moyse Morie

I came to the gate, where some dozen or so of devils were playing tennis ... in
their hands they held rackets of fire; but what amazed me still more was that
books, apparently full of wind and rubbish, served them for tennis balls, a strange
and marvellous thing.

— Cervantes, Don Quixote, Chapter 70, trans. John Ormsby

Introduction

hat are the most dangerous books in the world? Some might nominate the

VV founding texts of our major religions, which through misinterpretation
and manipulation have led to the suffering of millions over the centuries. Others
might point to defining modern political works such as Karl Marx's Das Kapital,
Hitler's Mein Kampf, or Chairman Mao's Little Red Book. Fiction can also gravely
offend public sensibilities, as we have seen in recent decades with book burnings
of the Satanic Verses and Harry Potter novels. But for many down the millennia and
across the globe no books have been more feared than grimoires: then again, no
books have been more valued and revered.

'Grimoire' has a familiar ring to many people, particularly following the
popularity of such 'teen witch' dramas as Bujfy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed,
but few people are sure what it means, and my computer spellchecker certainly
does not know what to make of it. Put simply, then, grimoires are books of
conjurations and charms, providing instructions on how to make magical objects
such as protective amulets and talismans. They are repositories of knowledge that
arm people against evil spirits and witches, heal their illnesses, fulfil their sexual
desires, divine and alter their destiny, and much else besides. Grimoires are books
of magic, then, but not all books of magic are grimoires, for as we shall see, some
magic texts were concerned with discovering and using the secrets of the natural
world rather than being based on the conjuration of spirits, the power of words, or
the ritual creation of magical objects. The derivation of 'grimoire' is not entirely
certain. In the early nineteenth century it was suggested that it came from the
Italian 'rimario', a book of rhymes or Bible verses. It more likely derives from the
French word 'grammaire', which originally referred to a work written in Latin.
By the eighteenth century it was being widely used in France to refer to magic
books, perhaps because many of them continued to circulate in Latin manuscripts
at a time when most other publications were in French. It was used as a figure of
speech to denote something that was difficult to read or impossible to understand,
such as, 'it is like a grimoire to me'. 1 It was only in the nineteenth century, with
the educated resurgence of interest in the occult, that it began to enter general
English usage.

2 | Introduction

Defining the meaning of magic is a far trickier task. For all the time, paper, and
intellectual energy spent on trying to do so, there is no overarching answer. Any
useful understanding must be tied to the cultures of the people being studied in
specific periods and places. 2 The boundary between religion and magic is certainly
never clear-cut and changes over time and in relation to different religious belief
systems. This will become clear in the first chapter. What is worth stating now is
that grimoires never represented the totality of people's experience and know-
ledge of magic in the past. There are numerous charms, spells, and rituals that
were passed down orally through many generations, and were only recorded in
writing by folklorists and antiquarians in the nineteenth century. Furthermore,
women have always been as important as men in the recorded history of magical
practice, yet because of their restricted access to literacy, they play only a minor
role in the story of grimoires until the sixteenth century.

Grimoires exist because of the desire to create a physical record of magical
knowledge, reflecting concerns regarding the uncontrollable and corruptible
nature of the oral transmission of valuable secret or sacred information. This
urge to provide a tangible magical archive dates right back to the ancient civil-
ization of Babylonia in the second millennium bce. But grimoires also exist
because the very act of writing itself was imbued with occult or hidden power.
'A book of magic is also a magical book,' as one historian of the subject has
observed. 3 As this suggests, I am concerned with the history of books and not just
the magic they contained. It is important to understand their meaning and social
significance, and to consider the endless attempts by religious and secular author-
ities to censor and suppress them. In this sense, grimoires represent much more
than magic. 4 They tell us about fundamental developments in history over the past
two thousand years. To understand their past is to understand the spread of
Christianity and Islam, the development of early science, the cultural influence
of print, the growth of literacy, the social impact of slavery and colonialism, and
the expansion of Western cultures across the oceans.

This story concerns the spread of written magic from the ancient Middle East,
through Europe and then across the Atlantic, but it is important to highlight that
other venerable literary cultures also enshrined their magical knowledge in writ-
ing and considered writing magical. India's literary heritage, in particular, was a
major influence across much of south Asia. The various Batak ethnic groups of
Sumatra, for instance, have long had a semi-literate culture, perhaps for a millen-
nium and more. Their alphabet is based on the Brahmi script, the earliest examples
of which have been found in Southern India, dating to the third century bce.
Writing was primarily a tool of magic for the Batak, preserving their magical
tradition more faithfully than oral transmission. The art of writing was largely the
preserve of the datu or priest-magician, who recorded it in magic books (poestaha)

Introduction | 3

inscribed on the inner bark of the dim tree and folded like an accordion. 5 The
literary magic of the East also influenced the West through early trading links.
Magic squares consisting of a grid of numbers of astrological, metaphysical, or
mystical significance are thought to have spread westwards from China in the late
first millennium thanks to Persian and Arab traders. The magic square also became
an integral element of Indian magic, perhaps around the same time as papermak-
ing was introduced there from China in the eighth century. One of the earliest
surviving Indian expositions of the art was a book of mathematics written in 1356.
Other elements of astrological magic also filtered from India into the writings of
Islamic Arab and Persian scientists and magicians. 6

Books can be magical without actually containing magic. In the past, unedu-
cated people identified certain physical attributes of books, such as large size,
venerable appearance, and contents full of unfamiliar signs, figures, and languages
as indicative of magical purpose. Practitioners of magic sometimes displayed books
which matched these characteristics in their consulting rooms to give the impres-
sion that they were adepts in the occult arts, even though the texts had nothing to
do with magic. Some books were also used as protective talismans. 7 The most
obvious example is the Bible, which people placed under their pillow to protect
them from witches and evil spirits, or touched when swearing oaths. It was also
used in popular divination. By placing a key at certain passages in the Bible,
binding and then suspending it, the divine power enshrined in the 'good book'
would make it turn in response to the name of a thief. The Bible was obviously
not a grimoire, but the power of the words, stories, psalms, and prayers it
contained, as well as its holiness as an object, made it the most widely used
magic resource across the social and cultural spectrum over the past thousand
years. Passages written on scraps of paper were used as healing charms, and the
psalms were read for magical effect. So as we shall see, in the Christian world the
Bible has always been thought a necessary companion of the grimoire, and both
were required to make magic.

It is no wonder, then, that as Christianity spread across the European colonies
natives wondered whether the Bible was the occult source of power of the white
colonizers. Amongst the peoples of parts of Africa, South America, the Caribbean,
and the South Pacific, anthropologists have found a widespread notion that the
white man deliberately withheld the full power of Christianity in order to keep
them in a state of subjugation. This was not necessarily achieved by restricting
literacy, but by deliberately withholding some of the true Bible and therefore the
complete key to wisdom, knowledge, and consequently power. 8 In the Caribbean
today, for instance, the Bible is considered by some as an African divine text
appropriated and controlled by Europeans. When asked why he accepted the
Bible but not Catholicism, a worshipper of the Trinidadian spirit religion of

4 | Introduction

Orisha explained, 'The Bible came from Egypt; it was stolen by the Catholics who
added and removed parts for their own purposes.' 9 As we shall see, such notions
proved fertile ground for the spread of grimoires that purported to contain these
missing parts. The notion that sacred knowledge has been withheld was not just a
product of colonial tensions. The Bible, as we know it, is the result of a highly
selective and political process of compilation. The elements that make up the
Bible were chosen from a diverse range of biblical texts. Yet the Church never
managed to suppress those apocryphal biblical gospels, histories, stories, and
events dismissed and excluded from the official Bible story. This alternative
literary biblical tradition became the source of numerous magical traditions that
continue today.

A grimoire is defined by the writing it contains, but the act of writing can itself
be magic and certain words can have active properties independent of the holy or
magical text in which they are written. Their power could be stimulated by the
ritual use of specific inks and blood. Across the world from antiquity to the present
we find the notion, for example, that the writing in sacred texts was imbued with
physical divine power that could be utilized by eating or drinking it. In Numbers
5 in the Old Testament it is instructed that a woman suspected of adultery could
be brought to a priest who would make her undergo the ordeal of bitter water:
And the priest shall write these curses in a book, and he shall blot them out with
the bitter water. And he shall cause the woman to drink the bitter water that
causeth the curse.' If she is guilty 'the water that causeth the curse shall enter into
her, and become bitter, and her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot: and the
woman shall be a curse among her people.' If innocent the divine written curse
would not be activated.

The ingestion of holy writing was normally employed for healing purposes. In
medieval Europe sacred words were written on bread or cheese to be swallowed
by the sick. Some medieval religious manuscripts bear the signs of having been
rinsed with water so that some of the ink washed off and could therefore be drunk.
The seventh-century Book of Durrow, an illuminated manuscript of the Gospels,
is a good example. In the seventeenth century it was dunked in water by Irish
farmers to produce a sacred medicine for curing sick cattle. In parts of Islamic
West Africa passages of the Koran written out in ink are similarly washed and
drunk to cure disease and witchcraft. Amongst the Berti of northern Darfur, the
fakis (Koranic teachers and healers) write certain verses from the Koran on a
wooden slate, using a pen made from a millet stalk and ink made from a mix of
soot and gum Arabic. The water is then washed off into a small bowl or bottle for
clients to drink either at once or in small doses throughout the day. As part of their
graduation ceremony the Batak datu made his students inscribe an incantation,
dictated by him, on bamboo held over a heap of boiled rice. The scratchings

Introduction | 5

produced by inscribing fell onto the rice, and the ritual was completed when the
boys ate the rice and with it 'the soul of the writing'. 10

If writing was so important to grimoire magic what was the effect of the print
revolution from the late fifteenth century onwards? Magicians had no personal
influence over the creation of print grimoires, could not imbue them with power
through the ritual use of materials. The printed book was not integral to the
magic, rather a record of it. Magicians were merely purchasers of a product.

The importance of print was its role in democratizing literary magic. 11 The
presses could produce copies in far greater numbers and far more quickly than
scribes, and so the knowledge of the learned few became available to the expand-
ing literate masses. While print drained power from the grimoire in terms of its
magical integrity, it also empowered it through growing access and social influ-
ence. Furthermore, print did not usurp the role of manuscript; the magic latent in
the words contained in print grimoires could be reactivated through transcription.
Neither did print cheapen the aura of grimoires. It is true that the power of literary
magic was in part invested in the restricted access to literacy, which is one reason
why the history of grimoires needs to be sensitive to gender inequalities. Until the
twentieth century the literacy rates of women lagged far behind men. Yet, as we
shall see, even in the age of mass-produced grimoires and near universal education
there was a widespread perception that the ability to read was not the only
requirement for using them. The qualities of the magician remained important.
Whether by birth right, geography, or piety only certain people were thought to
have the innate power to possess and perform grimoire magic on the behalf of
others. So even when grimoires were available to everyone not everyone could
use them safely and effectively.

To end this brief introduction let me pose some riddles. What links Chicago to
ancient Egypt, Germany to Jamaica, and Norway to Bolivia? How did a Swede
become the greatest wizard in America? What did Rastafarians and Alpine farmers
have in common? Who is the 'Little Albert' famed from Canada to the Indian
Ocean? And how did a poor crossing-sweeper from Ohio become a feared
mythical spirit in the Caribbean? Grimoires provide all the answers. They not
only reflected the globalization of the world but helped shape it. The key to their
extraordinary influence lies back in the ancient world of the Middle East, which is
where our journey now begins.

Ancient and Medieval
Grimoires

The modem history of ancient and medieval magic is vast and often inaccessible
to the non-expert, yet there is much to catch the imagination and challenge
our understanding of religion and society in past eras. While European grimoires
were largely a product of the medieval period their inspiration lies much further
back in the religions of the ancient civilizations of the Near and Middle East.
In the eastern Mediterranean the religious traditions of paganism, Judaism,
Christianity, and later Islam rubbed off on each other despite the obvious antag-
onisms in terms of competing political influence. How medieval scholars under-
stood that distant past and reconstructed it, often wrongly, was as important to the
history of magic as the magical knowledge actually passed down during the first
millennium.

The cross-fertilized intellectual culture of the Middle East was introduced to
most of Europe during the Middle Ages, at a time when the Continent has often
been portrayed as being in the grip of a bigoted and zealous Church, a period of
religious intolerance with the Crusades against Islam, the setting up of Inquisi-
tions, and pogroms against the Jews. This portrayal is far from being completely
unjustified, yet the medieval era was also an age of extraordinary scholarly
collaboration and understanding between different religions and cultures. The
writings of the pagan ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians were translated and
pored over, and churchmen travelled across Europe to immerse themselves in the
Arabic sciences and Jewish mysticism taught in the schools of Spain and southern
France. Magic was seen as an aspect of science as well as religion, and its roots were

Ancient and Medieval Grimoires | 7

traced back thousands of years through the wider reconstruction of the history of
written knowledge. So to understand the origins of the grimoire we must explore
the ancient world through the prism of the medieval intellectual mind.

Ancient masters of magic

The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that the priests of a Persian tribe, the
Magi, were the first practitioners of magic, taught to them by their founder
Zoroaster. The 'wise men from the East' who came bearing gifts for the baby
Jesus were their representatives. According to the naturalist and military man
Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century ce, 'without doubt magic was first
invented over there in Persia by Zoroaster . . . But it is not established whether
there was just one man of this name or whether there was another one afterward
too.' He went on to report that the Greek mathematician Eudoxus calculated that
Zoroaster lived six thousand years before the death of Plato. That would put the
age of Zoroaster and the birth of magic to around 6347 bce. But Pliny went on to
make a distinction between the invention of magic and when it was first written
down. As far as he could discover, the first man to do that was a Persian magician
and astrologer named Osthanes, who accompanied King Xerxes in his failed war
with Greece (480 bce), and in the process 'scattered, as it were, the seeds of the
hideous craft along the way, infecting the world with it'. 1

In Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, which were ultimately influenced
by Babylonian myth, the origins of magic books were dated to the age before the
great Flood. While some Hebrew and Samaritan texts ascribed writings to the first
man Adam, in late antiquity and the medieval period Enoch (Idris in Arabic) was
more generally believed to be the inventor of books. As is evident from fragments
of the famed Dead Sea Scrolls, found in caves around Qumran near the Dead Sea
in the mid-twentieth century, purported Books of Enoch containing astronomical,
astrological, and angelic lore were circulating at the time of Jesus. According to
one medieval account, Enoch's great-grandson Noah received his understanding
of medicine from a book of knowledge given to him by the archangel Raphael. It
was a book that had been concealed in a cave since the time of Adam. Enoch read
it there and learned the art of astronomy, while Noah found in it advice on
constructing the Ark. Another tradition relates how the angel Raziel communi-
cated to Noah a secret book containing the art of astrology, which was then
written on a sapphire that Noah kept in a golden chest that he brought with him
in the Ark. This was subsequently inherited by his son Shem. A surviving
astrological tract called the Treatise of Shem dates to sometime in the late first
century bce or early ce. 2

8 | Ancient and Medieval Grimoires

So, according to this biblical chronology, the earliest works on the occult
sciences were those studied by Enoch. The first book of conjuration and magic,
though, is associated with Noah's sons Shem and Ham (Cham in Latin). Histories
of the lives of Noah's sons outside the Old Testament were mutable and some-
times conflicting. In some accounts Ham wrote down the secrets of his demonic
magic on metal plates and stone tablets before the Flood, buried them, and then
returned to them once the waters had subsided. Others, such as the first Bishop of
Norwich (d. 1 1 19), thought his magic book was secreted in the Ark: 'the ark was
of small compass; but yet even there Ham preserved the arts of magic and
idolatry.' In some medieval texts Zoroaster is the son of Ham and in others he is
Ham. According to the twelfth-century scholar Michael Scot, in his history of
astrology and astronomy, Zoroaster was the inventor of magic, but he was
descended from Shem, and it was Ham who invented the art of divination with
the help of demons. Ham then taught it to his son Canaan who wrote down the
secrets of the art in thirty volumes, which were burned after he was killed in battle.
As to the lasting heritage of Noah's sons, one commentary recorded the belief that
Japhet was the father of all Europeans, Shem the heir to Africa, while the pagan
peoples of Asia, and tellingly, the Egyptians, descended from Ham. 3

Although Persia was seen as the source of magic, the people of the ancient
civilization of Chaldea, part of Babylonia, were also renowned for their astro-
logical and magical abilities. Zoroaster was sometimes referred to as a Chaldean. In
archaeological terms too, the Sumerian-inspired cuneiform writing of the
Akkadians, one of the peoples of the Mesopotamian region, represent the first
major repository of written magic spells and conjurations, though their secrets
were only deciphered in the nineteenth century. In Uruk, one of the world's
earliest cities, and now part of Iraq, excavations of houses dating from the fifth and
fourth centuries bce turned up cuneiform clay tablets containing a series of magic
rituals and incantations. They were, it seems, the private libraries of well-known
scribes and exorcists. 4 By the birth of Christ, though, it was the later civilization of
Egypt that was seen by Greeks, Romans, Christians, Jews, and later Muslims, as
the centre of magic and the home of the most adept magician priests. According to
the Jewish Talmud, nine-tenths of the world's sorcery resided in Egypt. 3 It was
the place of pilgrimage for all those who desired to learn the magical arts. It was
believed in later antiquity that even famous Greek philosophers such as Plato and
Pythagoras had been instructed in wisdom and occult knowledge by Egyptian
priests. Centuries after his death, those who subscribed to the teachings of
Pythagoras continued to be suspected of dabbling in magic. 6 Most of the early
physical evidence for ancient Egyptian magic derives from burial goods, amulets,
stone monuments, and inscriptions on metal and clay tablets and bowls. They
remind us that we should not think of literary magic only in terms of the written

Ancient and Medieval Grimoires | 9

page. While books were principally used as records, the power of written words
was effected through their transcription on to ritual or protective objects.

The first identifiable phase in the development of the grimoire occurred during
the Hellenistic period, when Egypt was under Greek rule for three hundred years
following Alexander the Great's conquest of the country in 332 bce This was a
fertile period of cultural and religious exchange, with the Egyptian priesthood
learning and using Greek and the Greeks imbibing Egyptian religion and magic.
One result of this fusion was the founding of the great Library of Alexandria,
which attracted scholars from all over the Greek world. Another was the Coptic
writing system constructed from the Greek alphabet and Egyptian phonetics.
More to the point, thanks to the amazing nineteenth-century archaeological
discoveries of what are known as the Graeco-Egyptian papyri, we can see how
the magic tradition that would later spread across Europe was largely a product of
cultural exchange in Hellenistic Egypt. These papyri date from the late first
century bce to the fifth century ce, thus mostly from the period of Roman rule,
and are written in Greek, Demotic Egyptian, and Coptic rather than the hiero-
glyphic magic associated with Egyptian temples and burial monuments. They
contain a fascinating mix of Egyptian, Greek, and Jewish religious influences, and
there is considerable debate about how much and which of the spells and
conjurations are truly Egyptian in origin. There are distinct differences between
the magic they contain and that found in the earliest magical inscriptions and
papyri from the time of the pharaohs. While the latter are primarily concerned
with health and protection, the Graeco-Egyptian papyri manuscripts are much
more focused on the desires and ambitions of the magician, with magic used for
financial gain, social success, and sexual conquest. The summoning of visions of
deities to impart occult knowledge or divine the future was also a major com-
ponent of the ritual magic of the later period. 7

In biblical chronology Moses is calculated by theological scholars to have lived
sometime between the fifteenth and thirteenth century bce — long after the Flood.
This prophet, miracle worker, and leader of the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt had
an eventful life by all accounts, but there are two episodes that bear directly on the
grimoire tradition. The first was his and Aaron's titanic magic contest against the
Pharaoh's wizards, during which, as told in Exodus, he turned the rivers and pools
of Egypt into blood and summoned up a plague of flies. The second was his
reception of the Torah and the two tablets bearing the Ten Commandments
during his revelation on Mount Sinai. The former sealed the tradition of Moses
the magician while the latter was the source of myths regarding the divine
transmission of more secret knowledge than is mentioned in the Torah and Old
Testament.

10 I Ancient and Medieval Grimoires

According to the New Testament (Acts 7:22) 'Moses was learned in all the
wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds.' In an Egyptian
context, wisdom was taken in antiquity to mean occult knowledge and this
comment represents a more general belief at the time that Moses had learned
the art of magic during his time in Egypt — he was after all born there and brought
up in Pharaoh's household. The Greek pagan Celsus, writing in the second
century ce, asserted that the Jews were much addicted to the sorcery taught
them by Moses. It was certainly the case that by the time of Jesus their reputation
as magicians had grown to a similar level to that of the Egyptians. During Roman
rule there is evidence of Jewish magicians being sought out, and they could be
found in the entourage of high Roman officials. Jewish elements can also be found
in numerous charms in the Graeco-Egyptian papyri. 8

It was, however, fundamental to the identity of Jewish religion, and important
to Christianity, that a clear distinction was made between the 'portents and
miracles' of Moses and the 'sorcery' of Egyptian wizards. The gods worshipped
by the latter, and the assistance they sought from 'corrupt angels' and demons,
were vanquished by the superior powers of the one God acting through Moses. In
the process clear water was put between the cultures of Judaism and Egypt, both of
which were represented in the life of Moses. 9 Yet from the late medieval period
onwards, Christian occult philosophers, mystics, and magicians began to redefine
Moses as an Egyptian rather than a Jew, presenting him as a repository of Egyptian
wisdom and magic. Later he would come to be seen as a great African wonder-
worker in African- American popular religion. 10 Moses meant many things to
many people.

The Jewish Torah, or Pentateuch as Christians refer to the five scrolls or books
that make up the first part of the Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
Numbers, Deuteronomy), was dictated to Moses by God. But did he receive
more wisdom than the Jewish and Christian priests revealed? Over the millennia
many people have certainly thought so. Two surviving magic papyri from around
the fourth century ce are entitled the 'hidden book of Moses called "eight" or
"holy" ', and 'Unique or Eighth Book of Moses'. They mention other lost Mosaic
texts, namely the Key of Moses, Archangelical Teaching of Moses, Secret Moon Book of
Moses, and Tenth Hidden [Book of] Moses. 11 The Eighth Book of Moses provides ritual
for meeting the gods and instructs:

Now when the god comes in do not stare | at his face, but look at his feet
while beseeching him, as written above, and giving thanks that he did not
treat you contemptuously, but you were thought worthy of the things
about to be said to you for correction of your life. You, then, ask,
'Master, what is fated for me?' And he will tell you even / about your

Ancient and Medieval Grimoires | 1 1

star, and what kind of demon you have, and your horoscope and where
you may live and where you may die.

There were also less elevated spells such as to 'put down fear or anger' which
involved writing a magic sign on a laurel leaf and showing it to the sun, saying
'I call on you, the great god in heaven, [strong] lord, mighty IAO OYO IO AlO
OYO, who exist; protect me from all fear, from all danger that threatens.' 12

If there is an Eighth Book it stands to reason that a Sixth and Seventh Book of
Moses might also have been in circulation at the time. We only know about the
Eighth Book from the archaeological discovery and translation of the papyri in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet, intriguingly, by the late eighteenth cen-
tury a manuscript claiming to be the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses was
circulating in Germany. Whoever wrote it would have been unaware of the
existence of a purported Eighth Book, but was no doubt conscious of rumours and
claims of the discovery of other lost Mosaic texts. In 1725, for instance, a book was
printed in Cologne claiming to contain 'the newly found books of secrets of
Moses'. 13 Three centuries earlier, manuscripts of simple, practical magical receipts
written in a mix of Hebrew, Aramaic, and gibberish, were circulating in Europe
bearing the title the Harba de-Mosha or Sword of Moses, though a work of the same
name was known as early as the eleventh century. One version provided a spell for
how to walk on water without getting one's feet wet, allowing the magician to
mimic a miracle attributed to Jesus. 14 As we shall see later in the book, though, it
was the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses that would have the greatest influence on
the modern world of magic and religion.

Hermes Trismegistus was the other central figure in historic conceptions of
ancient Egyptian magic, and the next great reputed author of occult books in this
survey of the dubious lineage of magic. In his most mythical guise he was a
conflation of Thoth, the ibis-headed Egyptian god of Wisdom, and the Greek god
Hermes (equated with the Roman Mercury). Thoth was thought to be the
inventor of writing and mathematics and therefore the patron God of scribes
and administrators. As the founder of the written word it stood to reason he was
also a supreme master of magic. His merging with Hermes took place during the
Hellenistic period and the result, Hermes Trismegistus the 'thrice great', was, as
one historian has remarked, 'more than the sum of his parts'. 5 But we need to be
careful not to present this version of Hermes as being the only one. In an Islamic
tradition dating to at least the ninth century there are three people identified as
Hermes. The first was Enoch/Idris, the founder of astrology who, by carving
his occult scientific knowledge on a temple, preserved the wisdom of the
antediluvian world for future mankind. The second lived in Egypt or Chaldea
after the Flood and taught Pythagoras, and the third was a great physician who hved

12 | Ancient and Medieval Grimoires

in Egypt and wrote books on alchemy and poisonous animals. In some accounts he
was also a contemporary of Moses. 16 Disentangling the various identities when
reading ancient and medieval references to Hermes is not an easy task.

The third-century bce Egyptian historian and priest Manetho reckoned there
were an impressive 36,525 books of Hermes. Several centuries after his death
Manetho was given the spurious authorship of one of these, the Book of Sothis,
which was essentially a chronicle of Egyptian Kings purportedly inscribed in
sacred characters by Trismegistus before the Flood. 7 Another estimate from the
same era mentioned the more modest number of 20,000 works, others mere tens
and hundreds rather than thousands. 18 Several surviving medieval and early
modern Hermetic occult texts were purportedly copies of works by another
ancient mage named Toe or Toz Graecus (Toz the Greek). A work attributed
to him on the creation of magical images, rings, and mirrors through the divine
influence of Venus was described as an 'evil book' by one medieval scholar. As to
the background of Toz Graecus, as one variant spelling of his name 'Thot'
suggests, he may have been one and the same as Hermes Trismegistus, but by
the medieval period confusion had arisen and a separate identity created. In some
later grimoires, however, he was sometimes referred to as Ptolomaeus Graeccus
and described as a disciple of Solomon. As a seventeenth-century Latin grimoire
entitled 'A commentary by Toz Graecus, philosopher of great name' explained, its
contents were the summation of all Solomon's knowledge, which he wrote down
in a book for his son Rehoboam, who buried it in his tomb in an ivory casket.
When Toz discovered it he wept with frustration at his inability to understand it,
until an angel revealed its secrets to him. 19 What was this fabled book?

The Solomon we are talking about, of course, is the Old Testament King, the
son of David, who completed his father's work of building the Holy Temple in
Jerusalem in which the Ark of the Covenant was housed. In biblical chronology it
is calculated that he ruled Israel during the tenth century bce. The account of him
in the Old Testament refers to his wisdom as being 'greater than all the wisdom of
Egypt'. He was the source of 3,000 proverbs and over a thousand songs, and knew
the secrets of plants and animals better than any man. There is no biblical
intimation of Solomon as being a great magician, but his reputation for astrology
and knowledge of the spirit world seems to have circulated in the Near East and
Egypt by the second century bce. It is the first-century Jewish historian Josephus
who presents us with the first clear representation of Solomon the magician,
telling how Solomon had written 3,000 books including ones containing incan-
tations and exorcisms to heal demon-induced sickness. The first actual magic
book attributed to him, the Testament of Solomon, was written in Greek sometime
during the first five centuries ce and probably originated in Babylonia or Egypt. 20
The earliest surviving papyri excerpts from it date to the latter end of this period.

Ancient and Medieval Grimoires | 13

There is no evidence, as some scholars have suggested, that the Greek version
borrowed from an earlier Jewish Solomonic book of magic. It was only centuries
later that copies appeared in Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin.

The Testament is essentially a tale of how demons hampered the construction of
the Temple by plaguing Solomon's favourite workman. Heeding Solomon's
prayers for help, the angel Michael presented to him a magical ring from God.
Engraved upon it was the Seal of Solomon that had the power to bind demons,
and was depicted in later grimoires as variously a pentagram, hexagram, or circular
symbol, while in Russia it was associated with the SATOR AREPO word
square. 21 The latter was a magic palindrome, examples of which have been
found dating back to Roman times, including amongst the ruins of Pompeii. It
was usually written as follows:

SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

Numerous translations have been proposed to explain its meaning, but none are
entirely satisfactory. The fact that the letters were also reformulated to spell
PATER NOSTER twice, arranged in the form of a cross, might suggest it was
of Christian origin. In several medieval Near Eastern churches one or more of the
words in the square were given to the shepherds who visited the infant Jesus. 22

Through the power of the ring, thirty-six or more demons were compelled to
appear and identify themselves to Solomon, telling him their evil powers, and
how they could be controlled by writing down certain words. So the demon
Autothith stated that he caused grudges and fighting but could be banished by
writing down Alpha' and 'Omega', the First and the Last. The dirty swine
Agchonion explained that he lay among the swaddling-clothes of babies causing
mischief. He fled when a diminishing form of the word 'Lycurgos' was written on
a fig leaf: 'Lycurgos, ycurgos, curgos, yrgos, gos, os'. Armed with this knowledge,
Solomon sealed some of the demons up in vessels like genies in a bottle, while
others were put to work building the temple using their superhuman powers to
speed up the work. Solomon lost his divinely bestowed power after becoming
besotted by a foreign woman. He was told by the priests of her land that he could
not sleep with her until he had made a sacrifice to the god Moloch. This he did
and subsequently committed further idolatry by building temples to two other
gods, Baal and Rapha. The Testament ends with Solomon saying he wrote down
his account for the benefit of others who might be inspired and aided by his

14 I Ancient and Medieval Grimoires

knowledge, but warned off the path to his own ultimate downfall, 'So that you
may find grace forever and ever.' 23

There is no doubt the Testament was used as a grimoire rather than merely read
as a cautionary religious or mystical text. A medieval version in the British Library
includes additional annotations by its owner to supplement and facilitate its use for
performing exorcisms. 24 The list of demons and their powers would become a
staple of later grimoires. During the medieval period other magic texts ascribed to
Solomon also began to appear. The renowned thirteenth-century scientist and
friar Albertus Magnus of Cologne noted that five necromantic books ascribed to
Solomon were circulating at the time. 25 One of them with a long shelf life was the
Almandal, surviving examples of which in German and Latin date to the fifteenth
century. The title of this straightforward guide to the ritual invocation of angels
refers to an Arabic word for a wax tablet altar on which the magician engraves
divine names and the seals of Solomon with a silver stylus. To heighten the
anticipation of the reader, and to ensure the magician knew they had conjured
up the correct celestial visitor, descriptions were provided of how the angels
would appear. The angel of the second altitude revealed himself as a three-year-
old child in a radiant red garment, face, and hands blood red with the fire of divine
love, wearing a crown of wild roses. The angelic encounter would clear the mind
of the magician, he would be overwhelmed by love and affection, and humbled
by the angel's assurances of redemptive friendship. 26

Despite being condemned by some medieval commentators the Ars Notoria or
Notary Arts was another similarly benign Solomonic work rather than a demonic
grimoire. 7 Its rationale was based on a passage in 2 Chronicles in the Old
Testament where Solomon asks God:

Give me now wisdom and knowledge, that I may go out and come in
before this people: for who can judge this thy people, that is so great? And
God said to Solomon, Because this was in thine heart, and thou hast not
asked riches, wealth, or honour, nor the life of thine enemies, neither yet
hast asked long life; but hast asked wisdom and knowledge for thyself, that
thou mayest judge my people, over whom I have made thee king:
Wisdom and knowledge is granted unto thee; and I will give thee riches,
and wealth, and honour, such as none of the kings have had that have
been before thee, neither shall there any after thee have the like.

Surviving early copies, of which over fifty exist for the period 1300— 1600, contain
prayers with words purporting to be Chaldean, along with Greek and Hebrew,
and various occult signs and geometric figures revealed to Solomon by an angel as
he prayed one night. Through employing these in conjunction with purification
rituals, the magician, like Solomon, could request the angels, saints, Christ even,

Ancient and Medieval Grimoires | 15

to bestow divine knowledge regarding the seven liberal arts of medieval educa-
tion — namely grammar, rhetoric, and logic (the verbal arts), and arithmetic,
music, geometry, and astronomy (the mathematical arts). 28 The Ars Notoria also
held out the prospect of experiencing ecstatic visions, and obtaining fast-track
means of becoming an adept in science and learning languages. Those who used it
were not inspired by greed or the manipulation of others for money, political
power, and sex. It was the first Solomonic text to be put into print, with a Latin
edition appearing around 1600, though it did not contain the notae or occult signs
and figures found in the earlier manuscripts.

The most enduring, influential, and notorious Solomonic book, the Claviatla
Salomonis or the Clavicule or Key of Solomon, was a true grimoire. The earliest
versions of the text were written in Greek in the fifteenth century and bore the
titles Magical Treatise of Solomon or the Little Key of the Whole Art of Hygromancy,
Found by Several Craftsmen and by the Holy Prophet Solomon. By the time they were
translated into Latin and Italian in the following century the term Clavicula was
being used. Although some manuscripts again claimed that they were translations
from Hebrew there is no substantive evidence for a Hebrew version before the
seventeenth century. 29 There is no one definitive version of the Clavicule but,
along with conjurations to command and control the 'Angels of Darkness',
manuscripts usually contained rituals and symbols for personal rather than spiritual
well being, such as to provoke love, punish enemies, become invisible, and deal
with thieves. We shall encounter its use again and again in the next chapter.

The New Testament, while rich in miracles, exorcisms, and magic, did not
provide any notable future grimoire authors. Yet there are two figures from the
Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles that had the potential to join Enoch, Moses,
and Solomon. One was Simon Magus and the other Jesus. We are introduced to
the former, a Samaritan, in Acts 8 where it is written:

But there was a certain man, called Simon, which beforetime in the same
city used sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that
himself was some great one: To whom they all gave heed, from the least
to the greatest, saying, This man is the great power of God. And to him
they had regard, because that of long time he had bewitched them with
sorceries.

This is an extract from the Kingjames edition of the New Testament, produced in
the early seventeenth century, and interpreting the references to magic, witch-
craft, and sorcery it contains is fraught with problems due to the distortions of
incorrect and imprecise translation. Furthermore, the choice of words was shaped
by the conceptions and perceptions of the translators. The use of the term 'witch'

16 | Ancient and Medieval Grimoires

and 'witchcraft' in early modern vernacular Bibles provided an important justifi-
cation for the witch trials. Yet the meaning of the original Greek words usually
referred to diviners and poisoners rather than people who performed malejicium or
harmful acts of magic to kill, injure, or ruin their neighbours and their goods,
which is how witchcraft was usually defined in the early modern period. Likewise
it has been suggested that poor translation generated an inaccurate portrayal of
Simon as a base magician. 30

Over the next four centuries after Jesus' death, Christian propagandists further
besmirched Simon Magus's reputation. It was said he used semen and menstrual
blood in his incantations. The second-century sect known as the Simonian
Gnostics, which was believed to have been founded by Simon Magus, was
denounced as being addicted to magic. By the fourth and fifth centuries he was
no longer just a magician and Gnostic but was being denounced as the father of all
heresies. 31 A host of apocryphal accounts of Simon Magus circulated in medieval
Europe, such as his demonic ability to fly, his conjuring up of vicious dogs to
attack the apostle Simon Peter, and his ability to render himself invisible. 32
Medieval Irish legends tell of the druid Mog Ruith who, along with his daughter,
travelled to the Middle East to learn magic from Simon Magus. His apprenticeship
lasted between six and thirty-three years, and one of the great feats he learned was
that of flying using a magic wheel, which he used to attack the apostles. In one
legend it was Mog Ruith, carrying on the diabolic work of his master, who
beheaded John the Baptist. 33

The portrayal of Simon Magus served the purpose of creating the antithesis of
Jesus. Both were seen as miracle workers in their own lifetimes. Some Jewish and
pagan critics dismissed Jesus as a magician, a necromancer even, just as Christians
later dismissed Simon Magus. The pagan author Celsus argued that Jesus had
visited Egypt to learn magic. 34 Jesus' feats were not as showy as the apocryphal
ones of Simon Magus, or Moses for that matter, but he nevertheless performed the
mechanics of practical magic if not the ritualistic aspects of it. He cured merely by
uttering words such as 'arise' and 'be clean', and applied saliva to cure the deaf and
blind. He cast out demons. His initial fame rested on these activities. Yet Jesus'
motives are portrayed as pure and his miracles effected through faith, whereas
Simon Magus, as the archetypal magician, was arrogant, sinful, vain, motivated by
base desires, and his magic all artifice and demonic. There is evidence, neverthe-
less, that care was taken about how and which of Jesus' miracles were included in
the New Testament, particularly in Matthew, so as not to present them as magical
in comparison with the healing magic practised at the time. 35 The authors of the
New Testament also performed a more subtle balancing act in comparing Jesus
with King Solomon. In light of the appearance of Christ, the reputation of
Solomon as the wisest man ever and forever needed qualifying. So Jesus is also

Ancient and Medieval Grimoires | 17

referred to as the 'son of David', and the emphasis on Jesus the healer and caster
out of demons demonstrated that he was not a second-rate Solomon. 36

In the Bible and the apocrypha neither Jesus nor Simon Magus are particularly
associated with written sources of occult knowledge and wisdom, in contrast with
Enoch, Moses, and Solomon. There are no stories of how secret books were
buried, hidden, or handed down for future generations. This is one reason why
grimoire traditions did not accrue around them over the centuries. There are
more obvious reasons why Jesus remained untainted of course, blasphemy and
heresy being two, but considering the reputation of Simon Magus in the medieval
period it is still surprising that he was not widely associated with grimoires. The
influential German abbot, occultist, and bibliophile Trithemius (1462— 1516), who
we shall meet again in the next chapter, apparently owned a magic book called the
Book of Simon the Magician, which presumably referred to Magus. 37 A Hebrew
manuscript entitled the Book of the Key of Solomon (Sepher Maphteah Shelomoh),
which dates to no earlier than the late seventeenth or eighteenth century and was
probably translated from Italian, contains a Satanic conjuration called 'The Op-
eration of Simon Magus'. It instructs that the magician stand in the middle of a
magical circle, and say three times, neither more nor less, these words:

I adjure you, O Lucifer, and all thy associates, by the Living God, by the
Angels above and below, by So and So, and in the name of A and B, &c;
I furthermore adjure you by Belzebuk, your Lord; I moreover adjure you
by Satan, in whose hands are the Keys of Gehinnom. I adjure you by
Lucifer, your King; I adjure you by the mighty deep; I adjure you by the
Law of the Lord, that you shall have no power to stand in the air, nor
beneath the air; nor on the earth, or beneath the earth; nor in the water,
or under the water; nor in the heavens, or beneath the heavens; nor in any
place of the world; but that thou shalt come forthwith unto this place,
thou, O Lucifer, with thy associates, or that thou shalt send three of thy
servants, who shall tell me the truth concerning all that I shall inquire of
them, in the name of AGLA, AGLAJI, AGLTA, AGLAUT, AGLTUN,
and in the name of ALPHA, V, HE, VJV, JUD, HE, MAHL, ALIHAI,
ELOKIM, ZEBAOTH, ELYON, &c. 38

But the fact that we shall hardly mention him again in the rest of our journey
confirms that his reputation had a minimal influence in the history of literary
magic. Grimoire authorship was generally associated with figures known for their
wisdom, knowledge, or Christian piety, even if the latter was achieved through
the renunciation of prior sinful magical practices. In this context a Magus grimoire
was a contradiction in terms for it could only be a work of evil, and therefore

18 | Ancient and Medieval Grimoires

indefensible by those magicians who believed they were acknowledging the glory
of God through their rituals and invocations.

Burning books

It is obviously a matter of religious belief whether Hermes, Ham, Zoroaster,
Solomon, or Moses existed or performed miracles let alone received and wrote
books. What is certain is that by the fourth century bce books of spells and charms
written on papyrus were being produced. 39 It was papyrus, made from the pith of
the wetland plant of the Nile Delta, that enabled the production of books, if we
define a book as a portable series of written leaves or sheets joined together —
which certainly does not apply to clay, wooden, or stone tablets. Papyrus books
consisted of glued sheets, sometimes up to tens of feet in length, which were rolled
around a rod. 40 Writing on papyrus required the use of inks, and this led to new
magical notions based on their constituents. Ink containing myrrh, a resinous
plant sap, was specified for some charms, for instance, and blood was sometimes
intermingled, as in a dream spell that required the blood of a baboon, the sacred
animal of Thoth-Hermes. 41 The one significant disadvantage of papyrus was that
it was flammable.

By the early years of Christianity numerous such magic books or rolls were in
circulation in the eastern Mediterranean amongst Jews, pagans, and Christians.
We have archaeological evidence for this as represented by the Graeco-Egyptian
and Coptic papyri. They were evidently sufficiently influential for the early
Church to launch a series of campaigns against grimoires and other occult
literature. Magic was explicitly associated with paganism, and in the struggle for
religious and political dominance the Church saw magic books as sources of
religious corruption that tarnished Christians and hampered the conversion of
pagans. The Church was by no means a trendsetter in burning books in the name
of religion. The pagan Roman authorities had kept a close eye on undesirable
literature that threatened state control of religious worship.

Their primary concern was the practice of divination, which also had political
and military implications. In 186 bce, for instance, the senate requested the
Roman magistrates to round up and burn books of soothsaying. Over a century
and a half later 2,000 books of divination were said to have burned on the orders of
Emperor Augustus. Some religious and philosophical works fared no better. In
181 bce a buried chest of books purporting to be the work of Pythagoras were
turned to ashes on the orders of the senate. Further east, Antiochus Epiphanes,
king of the Seleucid Empire, which was a relic of Alexander the Great's conquest
that stretched from Turkey to Turkmenistan at its height, ordered the seizure and

Ancient and Medieval Grimoires | 19

burning of Jewish religious texts in 168 bce. Christians were also the target of
imperial suppression, with the Roman Emperor Diocletian's edict of 303 ce
ordering the destruction of all copies of the Scriptures. 2

But it is the Church that most determinedly went after magic books. The most
well-known and earliest case concerns St Paul's conversion of the Ephesians to
Christianity. As related in Acts 19, many of the Jews and Greeks of Ephesus, a city
now in Turkey, famous for its Temple of the goddess Artemis, 'used curious arts
[and] brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they
counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.' Ephesus
had a reputation as a centre of magic in the Hellenistic and Roman world, and the
term Ephesia gvammata (Ephesian letters) was given to mysterious non-Greek and
non-Latin words, supposedly engraved on the statue of Artemis, which were
thought to have 'evil-averting' magical properties and were used in magic in-
scriptions and curse tablets. 43 A silver piece or drachma was equivalent of a day's
wages at the time so, whether the New Testament story is factual, the intention was
to show the value placed on the magic books in circulation in the city. Some Bible
scholars have suggested that those who handed over their magic books were newly
converted Christians destroying the last vestige of their old religion, though the
dominant interpretation is that it was Jews and pagans who handed them over as an
act of conversion to the new faith. Either way the sheer number of books involved,
if the details are to be believed, suggest that grimoires were not only in the
possession of the professional magicians and healers but were kept in many homes. 44

Saint John of Chrysostom, the late-fourth-century archbishop of Constantin-
ople, recalled how one day during his childhood in Antioch, an important city and
early home of Christianity in Anatolia (part of modern Turkey) , he witnessed
soldiers launch a dragnet for books of sorcery and magic. One magician was
captured but before his arrest managed to fling his unbound manuscript into a
river. While on their way to church John and a friend saw something floating in
the water which they at first thought was a linen cloth. On closer inspection they
realized it was a book and fished it out, only to find to their horror that it
contained magic.

There were we congealed with fear. For who would have believed our
story that we had picked it up from the river, when all were at that time,
even the unsuspected, under strict watch? And we did not dare to cast it
away, lest we should be seen, and there was a like danger to us in tearing it
to pieces. God gave us means, and we cast it away, and at last we were free
for that time from the extreme peril. 45

Such round-ups were evidently unsuccessful. A severe campaign against pagans in
the city launched in the mid-sixth century turned up more magic books. They

20 | Ancient and Medieval Grimoires

were still being used by pagans in the countryside as well. In the life of Saint
Theodore (d. 613) of Galatia, Anatolia, there is an account of an unbaptized village
magician who owned magic books that he used to deal with spirits and conjure up
clouds of locusts for a fee. 46 In mid-fifth-century Egypt, Shenoute, the abbot of
the Coptic White Monastery in the Theban desert, instituted a ruthless policy of
destroying the signs of pagan worship. When he and his followers vandalized the
shrine of a local notable they found and burned a library of sacred texts that
Shenoute believed also contained magic books, and they likewise destroyed the
library of a group of idol worshippers in the village of Pneuit. 47

It was clear to the Church authorities, though, that magic was not just a pagan
problem, even if magic was deemed pagan. In the 480s the Church in Beirut
launched an investigation into magic being practised by law students in the city.
At the centre of the allegations was a Christian from Thebes named John
Foulon. 48 While in Beirut he had become infatuated with a chaste woman who
resisted his attempts at wooing. Together with several fellow students, he decided
to use magic to call up a demon by sacrificing an Ethiopian slave he owned. They
were found out before they could complete the ceremony and the slave reported
his master's actions. When John's house was searched several grimoires were
found in a box hidden under a seat. One of the investigators, Zacariah of
Mytilene, later described how: 'In the books were certain drawings of perverse
daimones, barbaric names, and harmful, presumptuous commands replete with
arrogance and quite fit for perverse daimones. Certain of the incantations were
attributed to Zoroaster the magus, others to Ostanes the magician, others yet to
Manetho.' Foulon confessed and blamed the student ethos in the city for his
descent into magic, naming several other students of his acquaintance who
practised the art. A fire was then lit and he cast his books into it. Not long after,
some of those on the list, including pagans, were caught. One of them named
George of Thessalonike was reported after asking a scribe to make a copy of his
grimoire. As Zacariah recalled, 'the entire city was in a state of uproar because [the
students] were spending their time studying magic books instead of applying
themselves to law.' As well as this town-and-gown tension there was also fighting
in the streets as one of the suspected magicians, a pagan, drafted in some roughs to
disrupt the house searches being conducted by the authorities. These tactics
seemed to be partially successful for grimoires were found in only two homes
including George's. Once the street violence had died down the magic books
were publicly burned in a great bonfire in one of the city's public squares.

As various ordinances, edicts, and laws show, the Church had concerns that not
only fickle students but its own priests were prone to being led astray. A Church
canon issued in Alexandria, perhaps during the late fourth or early fifth century,
ordered that clergy hand over to the civil authorities any of their sons found

Ancient and Medieval Grimoires | 21

studying books of magic. It was in this period, 386 to be precise, that a Spanish
bishop, Priscillian of Avila, was condemned to death for allegedly practising
sorcery and consorting with depraved women in nocturnal revels. The following
century a group of bishops investigated the activities of some suspected heretics in
Tarragona, Spain, amongst them a wealthy priest named Severus, who possessed
three large magic books. He had been travelling to one of his estates when he was
ambushed by robbers. They took his books and intended to sell them in the town
of Ilerda, but fearing they were heretical handed them over to the town's bishop,
Sagittius. He kept two for himself and sent the other to his superior after cutting
out those sections 'which contained the shameful and sacrilegious learning of
magical spells'. Severus was brought before his bishop Syagrius for questioning.
He claimed that the books had belonged to his late mother and he knew nothing
of their contents. This rather lame excuse convinced Syagrius, who returned the
book in his possession, and Severus subsequently bought back the other two
volumes from Sagittius. At this point a monk named Fronto stepped in to accuse
Severus and a female relative of heresy. It all got very messy with Fronto organizing
a lynch mob at one point. A council of seven bishops was convened and they
decided to snuff out the case before it became even more of an embarrassment. The
three magic books were burned, and when Fronto protested about the termination
of the investigation he was beaten senseless by one of the bishops. 50

Over the next few centuries Church authorities from across the Christian
world issued repeated warnings. In 694, for instance, the Council of Toledo
issued an edict stating 'it is not permitted for altar ministers or for clerics to
become magicians or sorcerers, or to make charms, which are great bindings on
souls. And we declare that those who practise this will be ejected from the
Church.' 51 Edicts and canons piled up as the Church pushed its boundaries
northwards to the pagan lands of Scandinavia and the eastern Baltic, and they
increasingly focused on the laity rather than the clergy. By the end of the
millennium, with Christianity having been the sole religion across much of
Europe for several centuries, paganism and its ambivalent demons of the natural
world had long ceased to be relevant. In their stead demonic fallen angels and their
ruler Satan increasingly came to be associated with magic and its practitioners.
New enemies of Christ were formed and in the process many more books were
destined to burn in the age of Inquisitions.

The medieval mix

While the Church was ultimately successful in defeating pagan worship it never
managed to demarcate clearly and maintain a line of practice between religious

22 | Ancient and Medieval Grimoires

devotion and magic. The medical manuals known as leechbooks, which were
produced by the clergy or monastic communities of late Anglo-Saxon England,
are a good example. They were based principally on classical medicine but also
contained spells for healing and protection. How else was one to deal with
malicious elves for instance? 32 Some of the charms were Christianized versions
of pagan healing verses. While most of the spells included in these medical
manuscripts were enacted orally, in other words their written form served only
as a record, textual amulets were clearly an integral part of tenth- and eleventh-
century medicine as practised by clergy and literate lay folk. They consisted of
exorcisms and prayers asking for help and protection, sometimes interspersed with
magical holy names in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Apocryphal celestial letters
purporting to be messages sent from God and delivered in writing by angels were
also popular. 53 This is just the sort of material that made up a lot of the content of
the grimoires denounced by the clergy. It was the context in which they were
recorded and used, and by whom, that determined whether they were considered
acts of sinful magic or pious devotion. For the common people such distinctions
were largely irrelevant.

To further complicate things, not all magic was condemned outright by all
theologians. While magic had only negative connotations for some, a clear
intellectual division developed during the medieval period between natural
magic and demonic magic or necromancy. Natural magic rested on the premise
that interconnecting hidden or occult natural forces existed in God's universe that
could be tapped by humans. So plants, animals, and precious stones, for instance,
were composed of compounds and substances that could and did have curative
and protective properties, but some were also imbued with hidden essences and
powers influenced and activated by other unseen forces such as astral emanations
from stars and planets. The occult properties of some plants and animals were
encoded in their appearance. God had given them a signature identifying the
sympathy they had with other living things. So the mandrake root, which had a
roughly humanoid shape, was invested with human sentience. It was thought that
it screamed and cried when pulled out of the ground, cursing those who disturbed
it. A particularly contentious area of natural magic concerned the possibility that
humans and their souls could influence others. Could women harm people by
merely looking at them? Could thoughts and desires be projected? 54 These were
all ancient conceptions, but in the medieval period the boundaries of natural
magic were renegotiated, and justifications had to be found if those magical
properties deemed natural were not to be confused with demonic magic and
condemned as anti-Christian.

If magic was not natural then it was either fraudulent pretence, illusion,
or enacted through the power of demons. In the medieval period the term

Ancient and Medieval Grimoires | 23

necromancy, originally a means of divination by summoning the dead, began to
be used to describe such demon conjuring. This came about because of the
theological view that the raising of the dead was a divine miracle beyond human
influence. The supposed spirits of the dead who appeared to the magicians of
antiquity and the Bible were in reality demons in disguise. Similarly, those medieval
magicians who practised what they believed to be the pious act of ritually contacting
angels were accused of vanity and much more. The very act of conjuration was an
open invitation to demonic gatecrashers. Magicians had no control over the spirit
world and believing they could do so through magic was a denial of God's omnipo-
tence. The word 'nigromancy' also appears in medieval documents. This was a
variant spelling of necromancy, but it came to have its own meaning as 'black magic'.

As written magic developed in Europe new traditions developed in relation to
the use of parchment. Papyrus was not a native plant in Europe of course and rolls
were expensive to import. So as we know from Roman archaeology, bark, and
wooden and wax tablets were commonly used as portable writing surfaces. Ritual
curses and spells deposited at shrines were also incised on metal sheets, while
ephemeral charms were created by writing on plant leaves. Parchment, which is
thinly stretched animal skin, usually from sheep, goats, and calves, was already
used for writing in the Near East during the third century bce and began to be
increasingly adopted in the Mediterranean world a couple of centuries later. It was
more flexible and durable than papyrus and both sides could be written on. Pages
could be stitched together to make books, which were easier to consult than rolled
up scrolls. Religious considerations also shaped how parchment was used and
conceived. It was never adopted in Hindu and Buddhist Asia where the idea of
using butchered animals was offensive. Jewish religious laws regarding clean and
unclean animals also dictated that parchment for ritual purposes was not to be
made from the likes of camel, pig, and hare. From at least the medieval period
onwards deerskin parchment would come to be preferred for Jewish amulets. 55
Christians did not share these concerns and restrictions and the parchment book
became the medium through which the Bible spread across Europe. It was only
superseded by paper made from linen rags in the fifteenth century, a transition
sealed by the rise of printing. Still, parchment retained its special status for use in
drawing up legal charters and religious documents, and in magical practice.

Medieval grimoires sometimes specified that virgin or unborn parchment
should be used for making copies and writing out amulets. The former was
made from animals that had not yet reached sexual maturity, while unborn
parchment was made from the amniotic sac of aborted animal foetuses. The
reason for their use was to ensure the purity of the grimoire or charm; in effect
it was an act of sympathetic magic that cleansed the written word from the
impurity of thought or action of the magician. It was sometimes specified that

24 I Ancient and Medieval Grimoires

the magician should personally induce the abortion or cut out the uterus from
dead animals to ensure that no external agencies contaminated the process. The
use of ink consecrated by a priest further enhanced the act of writing magic. In the
age of paper this ritual rationale meant that right into the modern period some
magicians continued to use parchment to make manuscript grimoires and amulets
even when paper was a much cheaper option.

The magic of the first millennium, as we know it from surviving written texts,
was primarily a mix of Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, and Jewish influences.
Medieval grimoires reflect this, but new traditions also developed as scholars
and theologians reconceptualized and reconstructed, sometimes falsely, the cul-
tures, philosophies, and beliefs of the ancient world. While the magical reputa-
tions of the likes of Pythagoras were based on well-worn accusations levelled back
in antiquity, other great intellectual figures of the distant past became the subject
of new medieval legends — no one more so than the Roman poet Virgil (70—19
bce). Why he came to generate so many tales of conjuring capers in the medieval
period is difficult to fathom. He was said to have built an enchanted palace in
Rome, carried off the daughter of a Babylonian Sultan, and founded a school of
magic in Naples. As to the source of his powers, one legend stated that he obtained
them from a book found beneath the head of the fabled Greek centaur Chiron.
Gervase of Tilbury, writing in the early thirteenth century, related that an
Englishman had gone to Naples to excavate Virgil's grave. His body was found
perfectly preserved and under his head were books including the An Notoria.
Other medieval tales tell how he possessed Solomon's book of necromancy or that
of one Zabulon, a Greek or Babylonian prince who had invented necromancy
and astrology 1,200 years before Christ. 56 Virgil's magical reputation would spread
further during the early sixteenth century when popular books recounting his
feats of 'witchcraft and negromancye' were printed, and in Naples legends of
Virgil as a magician continued to circulate into the eighteenth century. 57 It is no
wonder, then, that Virgilian grimoires circulated in the early modern period.

The Greek-Egyptian astronomer and geographer Ptolemy, who lived in the
second century ce, also had his name put on works of talismanic magic a thousand
years after his death. But no classical writer accrued more spurious texts than the
philosopher Aristotle (384-322 bce). The most notable was the Secretum secretorum
(Secret of secrets), which consisted of Aristotle's apocryphal correspondence with his
former pupil Alexander the Great while he was fighting in Persia. It was translated
into Latin from Arabic texts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and contained
advice on talismanic magic. His name was also put on several works claiming to
reveal Hermes Trismegistus's secrets of astral magic. 59 In later centuries, though,
Aristotle would come to be more associated in popular culture with less
esoteric publications on fortune-telling and sexual advice. 60 The classical grimoire

Ancient and Medieval Grimoires | 25

tradition, as perceived by medieval chroniclers and romance writers, may have
been spurious, but the medical and divinatory writings of some Greek and Roman
authors were enduring influences on manuscript and print magic. Pliny the Elder's
Natural History, for instance, a monumental compilation of information regarding
the natural world, was particularly well mined by compilers of grimoires and
works on natural magic. Amongst the descriptions of medicinal plants, animals,
and gemstones were numerous examples of their hidden properties and efficacy as
amulets. The line of transmission of some of this classical knowledge to the West
stemmed from the religious and scientific cultures of Arab Islam.

The Muslim Moors of North Africa swept across the Iberian peninsular during
the eight century brushing aside the forces of the numerous fractious Christian
kings in the region. By the beginning of the eleventh century the Moorish
Caliphate had, itself, divided into some twenty feuding kingdoms whose rulers
were just as likely to ally themselves with the slowly encroaching Christian kings
of northwestern Spain as with their fellow Muslim rulers. These competitive
relations seem to have inspired a flourishing of Arabic scholarship and science in
the major Moorish cities, such as Saragossa, Cordoba, and Seville. Impressive
royal libraries of Arabic culture and learning were assembled, and amongst them
were works on medicine, alchemy, astrology, and astronomy. These were
eye-openers to inquisitive western and northern European Christian scholars,
providing new access to the revered knowledge generated during the Hellenistic
rule of the Near East.

In terms of European grimoires, perhaps the most important Arabic influence
concerned the interest in and practice of astral magic. 61 This was based on the
notion that the powers emanating from the planets and stars could be channelled
into talismans and images through the agency of named spirits and angels at
astrologically propitious moments. Prayers were used to beseech and praise the
actions of the spirits rather than to command or compel them as in the conjurations
of the Clavkuk of Solomon and the like. An example of how astral magic could be
harnessed is found in a fifteenth-century grimoire in the Bavarian State Library:

During the fifth day hour one should make an image to tame wild beasts,
such as lions, bears, wolves, and any other wild and harmful beasts. At this
hour cast an image of the animal of the sort you wish to control or tame,
and on the head of the image carve the name of the animal, and on the
chest the name of the hour and the name of the lord of the hour, and on
the stomach the seven names of the first hour, and fumigate the image
with Indian wood and with red sandalwood, and bury the image in a
place of your choosing, and with the Lord's help aiding you, you will see
that all those animals will be turned to your will. 62

26 I Ancient and Medieval Grimoires

The idea that divine and astral spirit forces could be harnessed by magical means
dates right back to the beginnings of recorded magic. It was practised in ancient
Babylonia, and Jewish and Indian influences can also be found in the Arabic
works. 6 So the Moorish tradition brought to Spain was a fusion of Near Eastern
cultural contacts, which for the first time filtered into the Western formulation of
natural magic.

Very few Christian European scholars could read Arabic though. So during the
twelfth century the centres of Spanish Moorish learning instigated a boom in the
translation of the hitherto largely untapped wealth of Arabic learning into Latin.
The centre of this profound exchange of literary religious, scientific, and magical
knowledge was the city of Toledo in central Spain. 64 It had been captured from
the Moors in 1085 by Alfonso VI of Castile, who declared himself 'the king of the
two religions'. While many of the Muslim elite left, Arabic scholarship continued
amongst Moors who had converted to Christianity and amongst Christians who
had been culturally 'Arabized' after several centuries of Moorish rule. The city was
also home to Jewish intellectuals fluent in Arabic. The impetus to translate works
into Latin came from the interests of the one intellectual community in the city
that contained few Arabic readers, the French-dominated clergy running the
cathedral and the numerous wandering scholars who travelled to stay with
them. Amongst them was the Norfolk clergyman Daniel of Morley. Sometime
in the late twelfth century he set out for the Continent 'for the purposes of study'.
Unimpressed by his stay in Paris he set his sights on Toledo. 'I hastened with all
speed,' he wrote, 'that I might attend the lectures of the wisest philosophers of the
world.' He returned to England with a valuable collection of books. 65 And so it
was through such networks, and the demand of European universities for insight
into Arab knowledge, that new works on magic began to percolate through the
Continent.

Of the various Arabic astrological and magic texts to circulate in Europe as a
consequence of this flourishing intellectual culture the Picatrix was the most
influential. 66 Known in Arabic as the Ghayat al-Haklm (The Aim of the Sage), the
Picatrix seems to have been written by an Arabic scholar in Spain around the
middle of the twelfth century. We do not know his identity though it was falsely
attributed by some to a well-known Spanish Arab mathematician. A century later
it was translated into Spanish and then into Latin under the orders of the Christian
king of Castile, Alfonso the Wise. It was a compilation of instructions on astral
magic describing how to make astrological talismans by drawing into them the
power of the presiding spirits of the planets and stars. The rituals of conjuration for
doing this required the magician to wear elaborate apparel including helmets and
swords. Animal sacrifices were involved such as a white dove to propitiate Venus
and a black billy goat to honour Saturn. The Picatrix did not advocate demonic

Ancient and Medieval Grimoires | 27

magic, but it is understandable why it was denounced as a work of necromancy by
some over the next few centuries. Its author boasted of having compiled it from
224 books. Be that as it may, it was obviously culled from various Arabic
astrological, alchemical, magical, and Hermetic texts written in the Near East
during the ninth and tenth centuries, and ultimately derives from Greek, Syrian,
Persian, and even Indian influences. Based on similar sources, a book of charms
and magic number squares called the Shams al-ma'arif (Illumination of Knowledge),
written in the thirteenth century by a famed magician named Ahmad bin Ali al-
Buni (d. 1225), went on to become the most influential magic book in Arabic
popular culture, but never permeated the European tradition to the extent of the
Latin translation of the Picatrix. 67

While historians now recognize medieval Toledo as an extraordinarily enligh-
tened centre of multicultural scholarship, for centuries afterwards it had a disrep-
utable reputation as the hub of necromancy. The French priest and writer
Helinand of Froidmont, who died in the 1220s or 1230s, observed for instance
that clergymen seeking instruction found the liberal arts in Paris, the law in
Bologna, medicine in Salerno, and demons in Toledo. 68 The city's reputation
for black magic was spread across northern Europe not only through such clerical
condemnation but also through the popularity of French and German romance
literature in which Toledo and its magicians were represented as a potent source
of supernatural power in tales of chivalric adventure. 69 As to the reality, in 1234 a
necromancer from Toledo was apparently found teaching magic in Maastricht. 70
The Italian monk Francesco Maria Guazzo, writing in the early seventeenth
century, recounted the cautionary legend of the friar and physician Blessed
Giles (d. 1265) of Santarem, Portugal. This vice-ridden scion of a rich family,
while on his way to study at Paris, fell in with a demon in human disguise who
persuaded him to visit a vast cavern in Toledo. Here he met demons and their
worshippers, and signed a pact with the Devil. For the next seven years he 'deeply
studied the Black Arts and Magic' before eventually seeing the error of his ways. 71
The legend of a cave in Toledo where magic had been practised for centuries, and
where a powerful grimoire lay hidden, seems to have developed in the late
medieval period. 72 One of the stories written by Don Juan Manuel, a four-
teenth-century Spanish nobleman from the province of Toledo, who unusually
wrote in Castilian rather than Latin, concerns a deacon from Santiago who
becomes a pupil of a great magician of Toledo called don Yllan who has an
underground library and workshop. The deacon eventually becomes Pope and
ungratefully threatens to imprison his old master for practising sorcery. 73

The Toledo legend was developed and given further legitimacy in the seven-
teenth century by the historian Cristobal Lozano. He wrote a fantastical account
of how during the Roman period there existed under the city a vast subterranean

28 I Ancient and Medieval Grimoires

palace of Hercules where magic was studied and practised. This occult under-
world collapsed and for centuries lay buried until, according to Lozano's take on
history, in 1543 the archbishop of Toledo organized an excavation and found an
altar decorated with bronze statues. A loud noise was heard when they entered
and some of the party died of fright. The archbishop ordered that the entrance be
sealed once more to prevent its evil manifestations from spreading. One source of
the legend is the archaeological remnants of a short subterranean passage flanked
by two Roman columns, which was probably intended to act as nothing more
magical than a sewer or drain. 74 Similar stories circulated regarding the city of
Salamanca, where the second oldest university in Spain was founded in 121 8. The
earliest reference to a cave-school of magic there is from a French chronicle from
the mid-fifteenth century. It is clear that Salamanca, by now considered the major
centre of learning, was deliberately or mistakenly associated with the old Toledo
Hercules legend. It proved enduring. The Jesuit theologian Martin Del Rio
(15 5 1— 1608), who studied at the university, wrote,

I have read that, as a result of the Moorish occupation of Spain, the
magical arts were virtually the only subjects being taught in Toledo,
Seville and Salamanca. When I was living in Salamanca, I was shown a
secret vault which had been blocked off with rubble on the orders of
Queen Isabella. It was a place where forbidden knowledge was taught. 75

As Del Rio's account indicates, the great age of Arabic-inspired magic in Spain
was thought to have been effectively suppressed by King Ferdinand and his wife,
Isabella, the monarchs who forged a united Spain during the late fifteenth and
early sixteenth centuries. The credulous twentieth-century witchcraft historian,
Montague Summers, who believed wholeheartedly in the legends regarding
Toledo and Salamanca, expressed great satisfaction that the monarchs had
rooted out 'these horrible and ill-famed schools', these 'abominations'. 76 In fact,
Ferdinand and Isabella, who sanctioned the setting up of the first permanent
Inquisition, endorsed the forced conversion of Muslims and ordered the expulsion
of the Jews, putting an end to a rich history of religious, cultural, and scientific
collaboration.

The other important meeting place of Arabic and European scholarship was
Constantinople. The city was the seat of the Byzantine Roman Empire, and in the
twelfth century, after a long period of dwindling influence, it experienced a
resurgence, in part due to its trading links with Venice and also the money
generated from the large numbers of Crusaders and other Westerners it attracted.
Art and architecture flourished. It was here, in 1 169, that the Kyranides, a book of
natural magic containing a mix of charms, amulets, and medicine, was translated
into Latin from a Greek text on the orders of the Byzantine Emperor Manuel

Ancient and Medieval Grimoires | 29

Comnenus. An ancient Persian king purportedly wrote it, though it probably dates
to no earlier than the first few centuries ce. Some copies stated the Greek version
was a translation from the Arabic, but this is unlikely even though Arabic versions
apparently circulated. The Kyranides became the most notorious work of magic in
medieval Constantinople, as is evident from several trials heard by the city's Eastern
Orthodox Church Synod in 1370. A copy was found amongst a number of magic
books, including one full of demonic invocations and spells, packed in boxes in the
house of one Gabrielopoulos. He was possibly a monk and doctor, and was
evidently a major figure in the dissemination of grimoires in and around the
city. 77 Italian manuscript versions also circulated further west, and in the seven-
teenth century several print versions were produced in German and English.

The importance of Hebrew scholars in the translation of Arabic texts has
already been noted, and now we must turn to the influence of Jewish magic on
European tradition. The importance of the Torah in the formation of the found-
ing myths of grimoires is clear, as is the influence of Jewish magic in the Graeco-
Egyptian papyri. As with Christian and Arabic magic, though, the medieval
period heralded new developments as well as a continuation of traditions from
antiquity. Once again, the heady intellectual world of medieval Spain was
centre stage.

During the twelfth century some Spanish Jewish intellectuals became particu-
larly interested in astral magic, for instance, incorporating it into their theologies
and philosophies of medicine. Through the Jewish scholarly community it sub-
sequently permeated more widely in Europe, with astral magic being included in
the medical syllabuses of the universities of Montpellier and Bologna. 78

As to the circulation of Jewish grimoires in medieval Europe the picture is less
clear. We know how prominent Jewish magic was in Egypt in late antiquity, and
it was a considerable influence on the later Arabic tradition, but determining what
was available in the medieval period is, for the moment, a matter of guesswork, as
much research remains to be done. 79 The now well-known Book of Raziel, for
instance, first appeared as a unified text in a version printed in Amsterdam in 1701,
though its various treatises on magic and mysticism clearly derive from a much
earlier period. The most notorious Jewish grimoire, the Sefer ha-Razim or Book of
Mysteries, was pieced together from a series of fragments by a rabbinic scholar in
the 1960s. 80 It is related to the Book of Raziel and likewise purports to consist of
knowledge revealed to Noah by the angel. Amongst its numerous spells and
angelic conjurations is the following piece of necromancy:

If you wish to consult a ghost, stand facing a tomb and recall the names of
the angels of the fifth camp, holding in your hand a new glass bowl
containing oil and honey mixed together, and say thus:

30 | Ancient and Medieval Grimoires

'I adjure you, O Spirit, Ram-bearer, who dwells among the graves
upon the bones of the dead, that you will accept from my hand his
offering, and do my will by bringing me N son of N who is dead. Raise
him up so that he will speak to me without fear, and tell me the truth
without deception. Let me not be afraid of him, and let him answer
whatever question I need to ask him.'

'Ram-bearer' is a Greek term for Hermes, and other linguistic and textual
evidence suggests the original work was probably composed in Palestine some-
time in the fifth or sixth century ce. It is, according to one expert, 'the first
attested Jewish grimoire' in the sense that it is the first example of a Hebrew book
of black magic akin to the necromantic works of the Christian medieval world. 81

There is certainly no lack of evidence for medieval Jewish magic, though, and
in recent years work has finally begun on exploring the amulets, spells, and
conjurations found in the Cairo Genizah, one of the most important repositories
of ancient and medieval Jewish literature. A genizah is a hiding place and the one
housed in the Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, which was founded in 882, contained tens
of thousands of pages of papyri and parchment on Jewish theology, philosophy,
and much else besides, providing important insights regarding both Jewish and
Egyptian cultures in the region. The Cairo Genizah had been known about in the
West since the mid-eighteenth century, but its literary treasures only began to be
explored late in the following century when they were dispersed to libraries across
Europe and America. By piecing together the fragments from the Genizah and
comparing them with European Jewish manuscripts of the medieval and early
modern periods, which is just how the Sefer ha-Razim was reconstructed, histor-
ians are showing the interplay of Arab and Judaic magical traditions. 82

The discovery of a Hebrew magic manuscript in the Cairo Genizah that was
probably written in eleventh-century southern Italy is just one indication of how
the exchange of esoteric ideas flowed both ways across the Mediterranean at the
time. The most influential example of this was the development of the Jewish
mystical interpretation of the Torah known as Kabbalah, which emerged in
twelfth-century Provence before developing further in the Spanish cities. While
Kabbalah was underpinned by complex theological and philosophical debates
generated amongst European Jewish scholars, its practical application was more
directly shaped and influenced by the fusion of occult traditions in Spain, and
Arabic astral magic in particular. Put very simply, practical Kabbalah was based on
the premise that Hebrew was the language spoken by God, and as such the letters
of the Hebrew alphabet were connected to God through divine emanations. So
too were the secret names of God transmitted orally to Moses and which provided
a key to the written Torah. The magical potential of this obviously appealed to

Ancient and Medieval Grimoires | 31

magicians, whether Islamic, Jewish, or Christian. By using combinations of
Hebrew letters and 'secret' names of the divinity they could enhance the power
of talismans and more directly communicate with the angelic world. Such was the
symbolic allure of the appearance of Hebrew characters that in some European
grimoires words and characters were invented that looked like Hebrew but in fact
had no recognizable meaning.

Of all the numerous Jewish holy names for God, Tetragrammaton became the
most widely used and recognizable in the European magic tradition. It was, in
fact, a Greek translation of the Hebrew name 'YHWH' (Yahweh). Jewish
religious laws forbade its pronouncement, and in writing other than in the Holy
Scriptures, it was usually indicated by abbreviations or signs. Although European
clergymen condemned a legend that Jesus owed his miraculous powers to sur-
reptitiously learning it from the Temple in Jerusalem, the word 'Tetragrammaton'
was frequently used in medieval Christian charms and amulets, and subsequently
filtered into the popular magic of Europe and beyond through grimoires. 83

For our final, albeit minor ingredient in the medieval grimoire cooking pot we
need to look northwards to Scandinavia, where Christianity only supplanted
paganism in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Grimoires or galdrabxkr were clearly
a part of the magical tradition of medieval Iceland. They are referred to in Church
statutes and other ecclesiastical writings, and also appear in a fourteenth-century
story of a student using his master's magic book to raise a storm. 84 What they
consisted of we can only surmise from later surviving examples from the sixteenth
century. On this basis we can assume the medieval books were based heavily on
the literary magic found elsewhere in Europe at the time, with the special addition
of runic symbols. Runes were the alphabet of the cultures of northern Germany
and Scandinavia, and were brought to England and elsewhere by invading Anglo-
Saxons and Vikings. They seem to have developed during the first few centuries
of the first millennium, though their use was gradually supplanted by Latin as
Christianity spread across the region. Perhaps before, but certainly after Chris-
tianity was established, runes accrued magical properties. In the mid-fourteenth
century a Norwegian archbishop issued warnings about the use of 'runes, black
magic and superstition', and as we shall see in the next chapter, people in Iceland
were executed for the harmful use of runes during the period of the witch trials. 85
By this time they also served a cryptographic purpose in the magical tradition.
This is most evident from several runic versions of the SATOR AREPO word
square found in medieval Swedish and Norwegian manuscripts. 86

Runes were largely restricted to Scandinavian grimoires but they have also been
found in a magic book from southern Germany, and even more intriguingly from
a fourteenth-century manuscript of Italian provenance which is now in the British
Library. 87 The latter work bore the heading 'this book belongs to the spiritual

32 I Ancient and Medieval Grimoires

works of Aristotle, and it is the book Antimaquis, which is the book of the secrets
of Hermes.' It is essentially a work of Arabic astral magic related to the Pkatrix and
also contains spells for invisibility and love. The 'runae', as the scribe calls them,
are used as a cryptic means of writing the names of planetary spirits, just as pseudo-
Hebraic or Chaldean characters were used in other grimoires. Their depiction and
their names are so garbled and corrupt that little sense can be made of them,
though it is clear that the original author of the manuscript had some knowledge
of the runic alphabet. As such the manuscript represents a rare counter-flow of
magical knowledge from north to south.

Saints, popes, and meddling monks

At this point readers might be thinking, with some justification, that there was not
much distinctly Christian about the literary magic of Europe. How could medi-
eval magicians profess to be true Christians? Well, Christian prayers and blessings
were also integral to the magic contained in grimoires. Christ, Mary, and the
apostolic saints were all appealed to for protection from harm, while apocryphal
accounts of encounters between New Testament figures were the basis for charms
that endured right into the present century. The sign of the Cross, holy water, and
consecrated paraphernalia were important defences against inadvertently conjur-
ing up demons. Although a blasphemous act, the Mass was used in some conjur-
ations, and was notoriously inverted and perverted in the lurid confessions of
tortured witches and in reality by some debauched necromancers in the early
modern period. The Church also inspired a new generation of bogus grimoire
authors. We have seen how in the early centuries of Christianity the clergy and
even bishops came under suspicion for practising magic, and from the medieval
period onwards the finger of accusation also pointed higher up the hierarchy at
popes and saints. What does this tell us? That ordination, piety, and power were
no safeguards against the suspicions and jealousies generated by successful career
advancement, wealth, and political influence. I will begin, though, with a saint
who probably never existed.

Saint Cyprian of Antioch is a legendary third-century Christian martyr who,
through confusion with the very real Cyprian of Carthage (martyred in 258 Ce),
came to have an enduring reputation as a magician and grimoire author.
The conflation occurred in Christian writings as early as the late fourth century.
The Spanish poet Prudentius related how Cyprian practised magic spells 'amid the
tombs to raise passion in a wife and break the law of wedlock'. 89 By the medieval
period the story of Cyprian the magician had developed into three books telling
his conversion, confession, and martyrdom, with Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic,

Ancient and Medieval Grimoires | 33

and Arabic manuscripts circulating across Europe and the Near East. In his
confession Cyprian tells of how he had, as a child, been devoted to Apollo and
been introduced to the mysteries of Mithras. On Mount Olympus he saw bands
of demons and the armies of the gods. He later travelled to Egypt and Babylonia
where he was instructed in Chaldean magic, alchemy, and astrology. He returned
to Antioch a great magician revered by the local pagans. His road to Christianity
began when he was asked by a client to use his magic to force a Christian woman
named Justa to accept his amatory advances. Cyprian called up a demon using his
books of magic. Justa's virginal Christian armour repelled the demon's assaults.
Stronger demons were conjured up but they too failed. Incensed by the impo-
tence of his magic, Cyprian vented his frustration on the people of the city until he
realized that nothing could beat the sign of the Cross and so renounced his magic
and paganism. In his confession he recalled how he wrote to the bishop, and
'brought the books of sorcery unto him while all the honourable men of the city
were present, and I burned them with fire.' J<) He subsequently rose to be bishop,
before he and Justa (now Latinized to Justina) were tragically martyred. This
legend of Cyprian the magician was reinforced in the early modern period by its
allegoric use by poets and dramatists. The English Renaissance physician and
astrologer Anthony Ascham wrote a poem about 'Sanct Cipriane, the Grett
Nigromancer', and the famed seventeenth-century Spanish dramatist Pedro
Calderon was also inspired by the story. 91

It is not surprising that spells and charms attributed to Cyprian also circulated
from early on in the Near East. An eleventh-century Coptic love spell consists of a
first-person confession by Cyprian relating his attempt to use his magic against
Justa, and includes a conjuration to an angel rather than a demon that begins, 'Yea,
I adjure you, O Gabriel: Go to N. daughter of N. Hang her by the hair of her head
and by the lashes of her eyes. Bring her to him, N. son of N, in longing and
desire.' 92 'Scrolls of Cyprian' were worn as talismans in Armenia into the modern
period, with an account of his life and times appearing in a popular Armenian
book of protective 'prayers for all occasions' printed in Constantinople in 1712.
The prayer was also a component of a common early-modern Ethiopian Christian
magic book known as the Arde'et or The Disciples 9 ' In the West, the prayers of
Saint Cyprian were used in love magic, but while Trithemius apparently owned a
demonological treatise bearing his name, it was only in the late eighteenth century
that Cyprian grimoires began to circulate widely in parts of Europe. One late-
nineteenth-century Spanish grimoire, for instance, related how in the year 1001 a
German monk named Jonas Sufurino, librarian of the monastery of Brooken,
conjured up the Devil on a mountaintop one night and was given a copy of
Cyprian's magic book as reward.

34 I Ancient and Medieval Grimoires

The Sworn Book of Honorius, which first appeared in the first half of the
thirteenth century, has nothing to do with the Emperor Honorius. According
to the earliest Latin manuscripts it was written by one Honorius of Thebes, son of
Euclid — presumably the fourth-century ce Greek mathematician of that name
who lived in Alexandria, and whose work was first translated into Latin in the
twelfth century. It tells how it originated from the meeting of a general council of
811 Masters of Magic from the main centres of the occult arts, Naples, Athens,
Toledo, and Thebes. They nominated Honorius to preside over the compilation
of all their magic books into one text, three copies of which were to be made.
Only the godly and faithful who had sworn an oath and been tested for the space
of a year were to be allowed access to it. The reason for the endeavour was the
magicians' fear that the pope and his cardinals, envious and diabolically inspired,
were planning a campaign to suppress them and burn their books. 94 The Sworn
Book represented, then, a radical challenge to the Church. As to the magic it
contained, which Honorius declares follows the precepts of Solomon, the surviv-
ing manuscripts consist of a series of prayers, some in a nonsensical mix of
purported Chaldean and Hebrew, spirit names, circles, and stars. By following
its lengthy instructions magicians would be able to have a vision of God, hell, and
purgatory, and obtain countless treasures and knowledge of all science.

Move forward a few centuries to the late 1600s and we find manuscripts
circulating amongst Parisian magicians bearing the title Grimoire du Pape Honorius.
They were not direct copies of the surviving fifteenth-century versions it would
seem, but similar enough. Somewhere along the way the Theban Honorius with
his Egyptian aura was supplanted by the crusading Italian Pope Honorius III
(i 148-1227). In the late eighteenth century the widespread circulation of a
cheap printed version of the Grimoire sealed this new tradition. One nineteenth-
century historian of magic suggested that the attribution was a deliberate act of
vengeance orchestrated by persecuted medieval magicians who desired to place
responsibility for their diabolic crimes on the papacy. 95 Maybe the association was
to do with Honorius Ill's failed Crusade to capture Egypt or because of his
protection of the Knights Templar, who, in the early fourteenth century, were
accused of sorcery and worshipping a diabolic idol named Baphomet. Then again,
perhaps the enterprising scribe who first penned the Grimoire du Pape Honorius in
the second half of the seventeenth century was ignorant of the legend of the
Theban magician, and the only Honorius he or she knew was of the papal kind.

Honorius III was not the only medieval pope to get an unwarranted magical
makeover. A similar fate befell Leo III, who presided over the Vatican between
795 and 816. A protective letter that he purportedly sent to Charlemagne, the first
Holy Roman Emperor, was circulating in manuscript by the early sixteenth
century, and in the late seventeenth century this was used as the basis for a French

Ancient and Medieval Grimoires | 35

manuscript magic enchiridion or handbook. One example entitled the Clavicuk de
I 'enchiridion du Pape Leon contained exorcisms as well as instructions on how to
conjure treasure and how to create pentacles or amulets usually involving a five-
pointed star or pentagram. A less necromantic version was printed several decades
later. 96

While Honorius's reputation was apparently an invention of the seventeenth
century, there were other popes about whom magical reputations circulated
widely in scholarly circles back in the medieval period, but who did not have
the ignominious honour of having grimoires named after them in later centuries.
The most renowned or notorious of these was Gerbert, Pope Silvester II, whose
short pontificate lasted between 999 and 1003. Rumours of his dabbling in the
black arts were circulating from at least the twelfth century when the English
chronicler William of Malmesbury, in listing Gerbert's impressive breadth of
scientific knowledge, mentioned that he knew 'the art of calling up spirits from
hell' and had used the 'art of necromancy' to discover hidden treasures in Rome.
One rumour suggested that he fled from his study of magic in Toledo after stealing
his master's grimoire. Over the next few centuries, legends of his relations with
the Devil also developed so that by the Protestant Reformation Silvester's repu-
tation was sufficiently besmirched for Catholic historians to try and rehabilitate his
papacy. 97 In the case of Pope Boniface VIII (d. 1303), rumour and legend added to
the political machinations that led to his posthumous trial between 1 303 and 1 3 1 1
on charges of demonic magic amongst other crimes. He was accused of having
three demons under his control and a ring containing a spirit. One witness testified
that he had seen Boniface drawing a magic circle in his garden, sacrificing a
cockerel within it, and then dripping its blood on a fire while reading out a
demonic conjuration from a grimoire. 98

The stories of magic-wielding popes were seized upon with relish by Protestant
Reformers in the sixteenth century and amplified for propaganda purposes. The
mathematician John Napier (1550— 1617) declared that twenty-two popes had
been 'abominable Necromancers' who had bound themselves to the Devil and
used their magic powers to accrue power and wealth. The names of some of this
tarnished twenty-two were listed in the preface to a pamphlet on the trial of an
English folk magician in 1566. The aim was to link the perceived contemporary
plague of sorcery and witchcraft with the Catholic past. So Pope Alexander VI
was described as a 'horrible Sorcerer' who 'gave hymselfe body and soule' to
'wicked Sprites and Divels', while Pope Gregory the VII (Hildebrand) was 'a great
Sorcerer and Nigromancer'. John Bale, a friar turned Protestant reformer, con-
cluded that the magic of the popes far exceeded that of the 'soothsayers of
Egypte'.' u The question arises why some popes were later chosen as spurious
grimoire authors and others were not. Maybe Silvester and Hildebrand did not

36 | Ancient and Medieval Grimoires

attract grimoires for the same reason as Simon Magus. For Protestants, and some
Catholics, they had besmirched reputations for diabolism, whereas the names of
Leo and Honorius could be used to promote the legitimacy of magic.

While the medieval and Reformation stories of necromantic popes and early
saints were mostly fictions turned into dubious facts, there is ample evidence that
the medieval clergy were the main practitioners of magic and therefore the
owners, transcribers, and circulators of grimoires. Monasteries were certainly
important repositories of magic books. During the first half of the fourteenth
century, for example, a collection of over thirty magic texts were donated to
St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury, by at least five different monks. Later in the
same century the impressive book collection of Friar John Erghome, which, at some
300 volumes, was one of the largest personal libraries in the country at the time,
became part of the library of the Austin Friars at York. It included magic works
attributed to Solomon, the Sworn Book of Honorius, and an influential Arabic work
on astrology by the ninth-century astrologer and scientist al-Kindi. 100 We should
not think of monks as cloistered away from the wider community. Many friars
served as parish priests as well as preachers, and so there was plenty of opportunity to
share their privileged access to magic books with the educated laity. Over and over
again in the trials of monks involved in treasure hunting escapades we find them
working together with the likes of schoolmasters and clerks.

The universities of Europe were the other main centres of grimoire production
and consumption. William of Auvergne, who was bishop of Paris in the early
twelfth century, recalled how while a student he had seen and handled some of the
magic books available in the city. 0 In the medieval period universities were
essentially religious institutions but they provided a fertile social environment in
which clergy and lay scholars intermingled, debated, and pushed boundaries,
particularly in the fifteenth century when the university training of medical and
legal professions became increasingly separated from ecclesiastical control. Many
students never actually graduated but attained enough education and working
knowledge of Latin to obtain administrative jobs such as clerks. In the year they
spent at university, and in the humming social and intellectual world of the cities,
there was ample opportunity to consult books of magic. The rather shaky Latin of
some surviving medieval grimoires suggests that this group of scholars were
significant players in the circulation and practical use of magic books. 102 They
were part of what has been called the 'clerical underworld' of magic. This was
inhabited by monks but also a range of minor clergy, parish priests, and curates
who did not necessarily have a university education, and may not have been well
versed in theology niceties, but who possessed enough knowledge of Church
ritual and exorcism to employ grimoires. 103

Ancient and Medieval Grimoires | 37

Considering the clergy had a near monopoly on access to grimoires, at least
until the fifteenth century, it is understandable that clerics who wrote about
magic, or who were associated with the major scholarly centres of the occult
sciences, would accrue unjustified reputations as being the authors of grimoires.
The Scottish clergyman scientist and astrologer Michael Scot (1175— c.1232) was a
critic of magic, but as he was canon of Toledo Cathedral during the height of the
translation boom in the city, was proficient in Hebrew and Arabic, and translated
some of the works of Aristotle, rumour later had it that he had also picked up the
secrets of necromancy during his stay. It seems that the first magic books bearing
his name circulated around Europe in the fifteenth century. The German abbot
Trithemius possessed a book of demonological invocations attributed to Scot
which instructed how to conjure up familiar spirits. 04 A sixteenth- or seven-
teenth-century grimoire in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, is entitled
Michael Scot's Magic Book. By this time his transformation into an adventurous
wizard had filtered into popular legends and tales in his homeland of Scotland and
further afield. 105

A generation on, the famed English scientist and Franciscan friar Roger Bacon
(c. 1 214— 94), who criticized Scot for not understanding the sciences, suffered a
similar fate after his death. 106 Bacon believed that books falsely ascribed to
Solomon 'ought all to be prohibited by law', and grumbled at those who 'put
famous titles upon their works and impudently ascribe them to great authors in
order to more powerfully allure men to them'. 107 He would be turning in his
grave to know that by the mid-sixteenth century John Bale could list numerous
Latin occult manuscripts attributed to Bacon, including such suggestive titles as De
necromanticis imaginibus and Practicas magice. Around 1527 a priest named William
Stapleton borrowed a book called the Thesaurus Spirituum from a vicar to help him
magically find treasure. Although not listed by Bale, surviving manuscripts of the
same name, though of later date, were also attributed to Bacon. Another seven-
teenth-century Baconian grimoire, entitled the Necromantia, includes instructions
for conjuring up the spirits of the dead. 108 His spurious magical reputation further
developed and spread through a play written in 1592, and a very popular cheap
book called The famous historie of Fryer Bacon Containing the wonderfull things that he
did in his life, which went through numerous reprints during the seventeenth
century. In this Bacon, who learns the occult arts while at Oxford University, is
presented as a good-natured comic-hero with a love of using his magic to make
moral points. Things get more serious towards the end though. He pits his wits in
a magic contest with a rival German conjuror named Vandermast where they
stand in their magical circles a hundred feet apart and call up mythical creatures to
do battle on their behalf. The famous historie of Fryer Bacon concludes with Bacon

38 | Ancient and Medieval Grimoires

repenting his use of magic. He calls together his friends, students, and scholars to
announce:

I have found that my knowledge hath been a heavy burthen and hath kept
down my good thoughts: but I will remove the cause which are these
Books; which I do purpose here before you all to burn. They all entreated
him to spare the Books, because in them there were those things that after
ages might receive great benefits. He would not hearken unto them, but
threw them all into the fire, and in that flame burnt the greatest learning
in the world. 109

Turning to the Continent, one of the most notorious of the bogus grimoires
attributed to medieval scholars was the Heptameron of Peter d'Abano, an Italian
who studied at the University of Paris in the second half of the thirteenth
century. 110 His numerous real works included discourses on medicine, physi-
ognomy, poisons, and the celestial sciences. It was the latter interest that got him
into trouble with the Inquisition. The only times he briefly discussed magic in his
numerous works was with the aim of distinguishing it from the honourable study
of astrology. His interests overlapped with natural magic but otherwise there is no
evidence to suggest he had anything to do with the Heptameron, which is con-
cerned entirely with the ritual preparations for composing a magic circle and
conjuring the angels. It would appear that, compared to Bacon, a longer period
elapsed before d'Abano became associated with grimoires, for the earliest verifi-
able evidence of the Heptameron is in the mid-sixteenth century. 111 As we shall see
in the next chapter, another manuscript attributed to d'Abano called the Lucidarius
was found in the hands of several Italian treasure seekers. This was presumably a
version of the Lucidator, a work that d'Abano probably did write, and which
contains discussion on the art of geomancy. This was a form of divination based
on the interpretation of lines or dots marked on the ground or on parchment.

Of all the magical works falsely attributed to medieval theologians and scientists
none was more enduringly influential and widespread than those bearing the name
Albertus Magnus (c.1193— 1280). This German Dominican friar, one-time Bishop
of Cologne, and author of numerous highly respected scientific works, attracted
the title 'The Great' in his own lifetime. Who better to promote a book of magic?
Latin manuscripts of the secrets of Albert or experiments of Albert appeared during or
shortly after his lifetime. They included some information from Albertus's actual
work on minerals, but most of it was culled from Pliny and a pseudo-Aristotle. It
was not a grimoire but rather a work on the 'science of magic'. This was at least
how one compiler defined it in defending it against accusations of evil. In other
words it was a book of natural magic and medicine like the Kyranides, of which the
compiler was aware. But it came to be seen over the centuries as a dangerous

Ancient and Medieval Grimoires | 39

grimoire by those who condemned it without reading it, and no doubt many who
bought one of the many print versions produced across Europe from the early
sixteenth century onwards were left a little disappointed. Still, if for fun you
wanted to see people standing around with the appearance of having camel's
heads, then the secrets of Albert was the book for you, advising the lighting of a
lantern anointed with the animal's blood. 112

Using magic

While for some the attraction of magic held out the possibility of such lofty aims as
learning languages and the secrets of nature, many owners of grimoires, particu-
larly necromantic ones, had much baser motives on their minds, mostly concern-
ing money and sex. Priests and monks made up many of the cases of treasure
hunting investigated by the Inquisitions and ecclesiastical courts in the late
medieval period. Treasure hunting did not require magic, and the activity was
not in itself heretical or 'superstitious', but tradition held that many buried
treasures were guarded by ghosts and spirits. Who were you going to call? Why
the priests and monks who had access to the grimoires which instructed on how to
conjure, exorcize, and control them. In England, in 1466, Robert Barker of
Babraham, Cambridgeshire, was brought before his bishop to answer for having
in his possession 'a book, and a roll of the black art containing characters, circles,
exorcisms and conjurations; a hexagonal sheet with strange figures; six metal plates
with diverse characters engraved; a chart with hexagonal and pentagonal figures
and characters, and a gilded wand.' These were to be used to conjure up a spirit
that would direct him to hidden gold and silver. He was sentenced to public
penance, walking around the marketplaces of Ely and Cambridge in bare feet and
carrying his books and magical paraphernalia, which were subsequently burned in
Cambridge marketplace. Across the other side of Europe the fifteenth-century
astronomer Henry the Bohemian, a member of the Polish royal household, was
charged in 1429 with possessing necromantic books and finding buried treasure
with the aid of demons. He confessed, probably under torture, that he and several
companions, two of whom were professors at Krakow University, used books to
conjure up treasure in the royal zoological garden. 113

In 1 5 17 Don Campana, a Modenese priest and treasure hunter, confessed that
'he once had a book, called Clavicula Salomonis, and another book, called Almandel
and some other booklets and writings with many love magic instructions, and he
said he burned them all.' 114 Love magic was, indeed, as common a use of
grimoires as treasure hunting in the period. The aim was either to entice
or coerce someone into having sex, enhance the sexual experience, or ensure a

40 | Ancient and Medieval Grimoires

long-lasting sexual relationship. Such binding magic could be achieved using a
variety of practices, from potions based on natural magic, to image magic and
necromancy. In Carcassonne, in southwestern France, a monk named Pierre
Recordi was sentenced to life imprisonment after confessing under torture to
attempting to have control over women by offering to the Devil wax puppets
containing his saliva and the blood of toads. In the same town in 1410 a notary
named Geraud Cassendi was tried by an inquisitor for attempting to debauch
women by invoking demons using a magic book and gold scrapings from an
image of the Virgin. 116

The flip side of love magic was ensuring that people could not have sex. 117 The
Picatrix was a useful source in this respect, providing advice for both causing and
curing magically inspired impotence. The following example of astral image
magic for the purpose comes from a manuscript attributed to Ptolemy:

When you wish to bind a man or woman, make an image of a man whose
feet are raised to the heavens and whose head is in the ground. This
should be made of wax, saying 'I have bound N. son of such-and-such a
woman, and all his veins, until he does not have a man's desire.' After
that, bury the image in his path, and he will not use a woman for as long as
the image lasts. And it is said by some that this image is made under the
second decan of Aries. 118

Sex, inheritance, and political power were major preoccupations of Europe's
aristocracy, and accusations of love magic and poisoning were prominent in the
increasing number of cases of heretical magic concerning royal courtiers that were
heard during the fourteenth century.

The medieval clergy and nobility did not have a complete monopoly on
grimoires. Although, as we shall see in the next chapter, the spread of magic
books down the social scale is clearly evident from the sixteenth century onwards,
there are already signs of democratization towards the end of the medieval period.
There is an account in French chronicles of a poorly educated sorcerer, Arnaud
Guillaume, who in 1393 attempted to cure the king of witchcraft. He carried with
him a grimoire called Smagorad, which gave him power over the stars and planets.
It was said to have been a copy of a book given to Adam by an angel. A surviving
German-language manuscript of the Almandal was included along with advice on
horticulture and medicine in the commonplace book of a late fifteenth-century
Augsburg merchant called Claus Spaun. His own annotations to the text suggest
that he had experimented with its angelic invocations. He added further practical
astrological guidance as to the appropriate angel to call upon, and made numerous
insertions insisting that the magus should kneel devoutly. 119

Ancient and Medieval Grimoires | 41

Women had always been major consumers of literary magic, as the many
written amulets for childbirth attest, but examples of women owning or using
grimoires is scant before the sixteenth century. 120 In Roman antiquity there are
allusions to the fact that some high-class prostitutes were literate and so could have
possessed and written magic books containing the love magic and binding spells
that were their stock-in-trade. The Roman poet Horace imagined his prostitute-
witch creation, Canidia, possessing books of incantations, and there is no reason to
assume that the small minority of literate women at the time were less likely to use
grimoires than literate men. 121 There are a few late medieval examples of women
having access to grimoires if not owning them. In 1493 Elena Dalok was brought
before a London ecclesiastical court charged with being a common slanderer,
professing to be able to magically induce rain, and for saying she owned a book
that told her of things to come. 122 This may have been an idle boast, but, if true,
her book sounds more like an astrological or prophetic text rather than a grimoire.
More convincing evidence comes from a trial six years later in Italy. Bernardina
Stadera, who was denounced in 1499 for being a 'charmer, conjurer and procur-
ess', was accused, along with her lover, a priest, of reading demonic invocations
from a manuscript she had borrowed from some friars of Modena. She deposed
that one of the friars had:

a book of paper, handwritten, with a white leather binding, of average
size, which he lent to her. She kept that book for six months, meaning to
copy what was in it, even though she never did because she had been very
busy. She anyway read that book many and many times, and found how
to make images and in what way they have to be baptised by a priest to
make people love each other, as well as how to curse the mass by saying,
'You're lying in your throat' when the priest says, 'May the Lord be with
you,' as she thinks. There was also a conjuration which included the
names of many saints, mixed with several names of demons. 123

The mistress of a French conjuring monk testified that she had heard him loudly
reciting passages from a grimoire, and on one occasion she accompanied him to a
hill where he undressed and disappeared behind a bush with his magic books for
an hour. She could not tell what he was up to. As with all confessions extracted
under the inquisitorial laws of medieval Europe, we need to be very cautious
about taking such statements at face value. When in 1370 an illiterate woman
named Benvenuta Mangialoca confessed that her father-in-law had instructed her
how to invoke demons using 'a big book' she had almost certainly been subjected

124

to torture.

It can be assumed, then, that due to the high level of female illiteracy, and the
physical and social restrictions on women's access to books, very few possessed

42 I Ancient and Medieval Grimoires

grimoires, though some clearly knew of and had access to them. The masculine
nature of medieval literary magic was also reinforced in the pages of grimoires, in
which there is a strong emphasis on sexual purity and abstinence, reflecting the
clergy's vow of celibacy. The Sworn Book ofHonorius instructed that it was not to
be given to women. Rituals often advised that the magician should not associate
with the opposite sex while preparing for conjurations and invocations, and that
they were to be kept away from ritual paraphernalia. At the same time, many of
the spells were to entice and impress women, while invisibility spells also often
had prurient aims. Either way, grimoire magic was clearly masculine in its
emphasis on the sexual self-control of the male magician and the sexual conquest
of women. That is not to say that this misogynistic emphasis was mirrored in the
actual use of written magic — as we shall see in the next chapter. 125

Despite numerous clerical and secular condemnations of magic in the medieval
period, attempts to suppress grimoires and their users were sporadic, ad hoc rather
than systematic. In 1277 the Bishop of Paris issued a condemnation of 'books,
rolls, or booklets containing necromancy or experiments of sorcery, invocations
of demons, or conjurations hazardous for souls.' Still, this was one of only a few
official condemnations of forbidden books issued by the University of Paris that
explicitly referred to magic. 6 In other words, other heretical texts were of more
immediate concern at the time. We do know that the medieval inquisitions,
which were instituted in the late twelfth century, and set up wherever and
whenever outbreaks of heresy were suspected, periodically found and burned
books of magic. In his manual for inquisitors the Spanish Dominican friar and
grand inquisitor Nicholas Eymeric (1320-99) recounted reading and burning
numerous grimoires confiscated from magicians, including works attributed to
Solomon and Honorius. 127 The extent to which the authorities were successful in
suppressing their circulation is very difficult to assess. Many were obviously
burned by the Roman and Orthodox Churches, while others were destroyed by
their fearful owners. Although numerous books of natural and astral magic no
doubt ended up in the flames, it is likely that necromantic works fared far worse.

Does the uneven pattern of surviving grimoires reflect the relative success of
the Church authorities and the reach of the inquisitions in different parts of
Europe? It could explain why the libraries of central Europe contain very few
explicitly demonic grimoires. Maybe such works also circulated less in the region
because copyists and collectors were more nervous about transmitting demonic
invocations and conjurations. 128 We also need to bear in mind that many late
medieval grimoires were destroyed during the campaigns against witches and
magicians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ruthlessness of which
also varied from country to country.

Ancient and Medieval Grimoires | 43

In 1258 Pope Alexander IV instructed inquisitors 'not to intrude into investi-
gations of divination or sorcery without knowledge of manifest heresy involved'.
The crime of magic was otherwise to be dealt with by ecclesiastical courts and the
secular authorities. Acts of sorcery and divination that savoured of 'manifest
heresy' were defined as 'praying at the altars of idols, to offer sacrifices, to consult
demons, to elicit responses from them'. 129 Definitions of both heresy and magic
were by no means hard and fast in the period, and as this papal instruction
indicates, a lot of magic was not heretical but merely 'superstitious' or rooted in
sinful 'erroneous' beliefs. But the definition of magic as heresy became increas-
ingly all embracing from the late fourteenth century onwards. The long-standing
but socially restricted concern over the ritual magic used by clergy and courtiers
began to extend to more popular, non-literary forms of harmful magic or sorcery.
Increasingly all magic came to be redefined as heretical in that it was all believed
to be inspired by an ominously encroaching Devil. Grimoires, with their
complex ceremonial invocations and conjurations, were no longer the only keys
to demonic magic. With heretical magic unbound from the book, women
increasingly became the focus of authoritarian concern. Before 1350 over 70 per
cent of those accused of magic in the courts were men, but during the early
fifteenth century between 60 and 70 per cent were female. 130 Here lies the origin
of the witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when across much
of Europe the legislature ensured that the poor, the illiterate, and women
supplanted the privileged, erudite male owners of grimoires as the greatest magical
threat to Christian society.

The War against Magic

The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries heralded three profound and
interlinked events in European history that can be explored through the
story of grimoires: the rise of print, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, and
the witch trials. For some, the Devil lay behind all these momentous events.
Printing was described as a 'black art' and books as 'silent heretics'. The success of
the Reformation was heavily dependent on the power of the printed page, with
Martin Luther being the most published author of the era. For him and other
Reformers printing was a 'divine' and 'miraculous' gift. For the papacy Luther was
the Devil's spawn and the presses a sewer of satanic propaganda. The English
Catholic clergyman Rowland Philipps warned, 'we must root out printing or
printing will root out us.' 1 For the Church, the Reformation was further con-
firmation of growing suspicions of a sustained attack by the Devil on Christian
Europe. A series of heresy and witch trials in the Alps during the second half of the
fifteenth century had fuelled concerns. These were born out by the increasing
number of German and Swiss states that rejected Rome and become Protestant
from the 1520s onwards. The Catholic Church launched its counter-offensives.
The Italian Inquisition was instituted in 1342 primarily to stem the Protestant
threat and the books that carried the heresy across the Alps. It followed the model
of the Spanish Inquisition and its regional tribunals, which had already been
combing the Spanish territories for other heretics for over sixty years.

For the new Protestant Churches of northern and central Europe the corrup-
tion of the old Church was portrayed as a sign of the arrival of the Antichrist in the
guise of the Pope. Pre-millennial tension was a major condition of the age.

War against Magic | 45

The Devil was active everywhere and theologians thought they had discovered an
ever-expanding cohort of his earthly army consisting principally of poor women.
The product of endless neighbourly rumour and suspicion, the popular concep-
tion of the village witch was transformed into the greatest of satanic threats
through the theological reasoning of educated demonologists. And it is no
coincidence that the rise of the witch trials during the early sixteenth century
occurred in the same period that print was becoming a major cultural force. It was
demonological books that spread the ideas and fears of this diabolic witchcraft
conspiracy, and it was the printed pamphlets detailing their execrable crimes that
penetrated far into the conscientiousness of the general population. The English
lawyer and printer John Rastell, writing in 1530, was not wrong when he
described the advent of print as having 'been the cause of great learning and
knowledge | and hath been the cause of many things and great changes | & is like
to be the cause of many strange things here after to come.' 2

The laws against witchcraft instituted across Europe during the first half of the
sixteenth century were not just concerned with harmful witches: all magic,
whether good or bad, was considered the tool of the Devil. Some demonologists,
both Protestant and Catholic, asserted that 'good witches' or cunning-folk, in
other words those who practised magic to help people by removing spells,
detecting stolen goods, and much else besides, were even worse than 'black'
witches. This was because the victims of witches did not become lost souls,
whereas the clients of cunning-folk, by resorting to magic, risked damnation by
being complicit in the Devil's works. So the secular and religious authorities were
most keen to suppress all magical practitioners. While the common people shared
their enthusiasm for the extermination of witches, they were not, however, so
keen to see cunning-folk on the end of a rope, dismembered, or burned to death.

Magic was an ambivalent force but a necessary one in most people's lives, which is
why printers, at considerable risk, soon saw the market potential. In 1528 the
warehouse of one Seville printer contained amongst its stock 8,000 printed sheets
oinbminas, a thousand of which were hand-coloured. These consisted of prayers and
names of the saints used as protective talismans. Nominas had circulated on paper and
parchment, and their appearance in print at such an early date demonstrates how
printers were quick to capitalize on 'superstitious' popular religion. 3 One of the most
popular was the prayer of St Cyprian. As early as 1498 copies were being printed and
sold in Spain, and they appeared in Italy not long after. That it was being used in a
magical rather than a devotional religious sense, independent of the clergy, is evident
from the fact that the Church banned it several decades later. 4 As we shall see, these
tentative attempts to assuage the popular thirst for magical aid were the first steps in
the history of print's slow but sure grip on the magical tradition. They also mark the
beginning of authoritarian attempts to stop this democratic process.

46 | War against Magic

The Renaissance mage

The Renaissance has been defined by the development of humanism, and the
enthusiasm for the discovery and rediscovery of the intellectual world of the
ancient Romans and Greeks. As one historian has commented, 'In the Renais-
sance, the "new" meant the "old," the very old.' 5 It was supported by the
patronage of a new wealthy urban elite, and spread through the medium of
print. However, there was nothing particularly revolutionary about the Renais-
sance in intellectual terms, and historians are now increasingly emphasizing that
the flowering of the Renaissance emerged from branches of medieval scholarship.
So where does that leave the notion of Renaissance magic? There was no 'rebirth'
of magic, no great break with the past, but rather a continuation and development
of medieval ideas about the secrets encoded in ancient texts, be they pagan,
Jewish, Islamic, or Christian, and the possible role that magic could play as an
adjunct of Christian theology. 6

Nevertheless, there were some significant developments in the magic tradition
during the Renaissance. One was the spread of Hermeticism in western European
thought. The Corpus hermeticum were a group of Greek religious and philosophical
texts written in the first few centuries after Christ. Although clearly influenced by
Greek philosophy, they were thought to encapsulate the far more ancient
thoughts of Hermes Trismegistus. We have seen that Hermetic writings were
known in medieval Europe, but their intellectual relevance was boosted massively
when, in 1460, a Byzantine monk brought a version of the Corpus to Florence,
where it was translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino (1433—99) and published in
1471. 7 As a consequence, Ficino became a central figure in the world of intellec-
tual occultism. His conception of magic was hugely influential, and the lynchpin
of the intellectual magic traditions of the early modern period based on the
Neoplatonic concept of a universe in which all things were interconnected by
spiritual bonds. The other significant development of the Renaissance, which
would have more of an influence on the development of future grimoires than
Hermeticism, was the spreading influence of Kabbalah in European magical
thought. The mystical system of Kabbalah that developed in medieval Spain had
been percolating into Christian magic before the late fifteenth century, but it was
its espousal by another Florentine philosopher and natural magician, Pico della
Mirandola (1463—94), that introduced it to a new readership and led to renewed
engagement with its occult promises. 8 Johannes Reuchlin, a German humanist
scholar and expert in Greek and Hebrew, further advanced its influence north of
the Alps. In 1490 he travelled south and visited Pico — a sign of the developing
European network of occult philosophers.

War against Magic | 47

The resurgent interest in Hermeticism and Kabbalah would also act as inspir-
ation for Rosicrucianism. During the early seventeenth century several curious
German publications appeared claiming the existence of an occult fraternity
founded by a fifteenth-century German knight named Christian Rosenkreutz
who was an adept in Hermetic and Kabbalistic magic. His followers, the Brother-
hood of the Rosy Cross, were dedicated to a spiritual reformation of society
through magical principles. There is no evidence that the Brotherhood existed,
but the pamphlets generated considerable interest and were quickly translated into
other languages. While some, such as the Jacobean playwright Ben Jonson, poked
fun at the 'Chimera of the Rosie Crosse, Their Charmes, their Characters,
Hermetticke Rings'/ others took the story seriously. We shall encounter the
Rosicrucians again with regard to the esoteric Freemasonry movements of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Much has been written on the nature of Renaissance magic, and its role in the
development of science, but what I want to focus on here is the way in which
natural magic and its practitioners were caught up in the authoritarian view that all
magic, whether witchcraft, natural magic, celestial magic, or spirit conjuration,
was demonic in origin and intent. It was the notoriety generated by these
associations that led later generations to associate the misrepresented reputations
of the great Renaissance magicians with sinister conjuration. In the process, the
sixteenth-century heirs to the Florentine magicians became the new generation of
bogus grimoire authors, joining the biblical magicians, medieval popes, and saints
in the occult firmament.

The most important of the Renaissance era magicians in this story was the German
humanist scholar Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (i486— 1535). 10 He
was a well-travelled young man due to his military service and his spirit of intellectual
adventure, and studied at the universities of Cologne and Paris. He was interested in
the occult from an early age, reading the work of that other famous inhabitant of
Cologne, Albertus Magnus. He also studied the works of the Italian Renaissance
mages, and when, around 1 5 1 1 , he found himself in Italy on military business he took
the opportunity to further his knowledge on Kabbalah and Hermeticism. The
German Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius (1462— 1516) was another import-
ant influence closer to home. 11 Trithemius had experimented with drawing benign
spirits into crystals, and his most well-known magical work Steganographia (Secret
writing), which was written around 1499 but only published in Frankfurt in 1606,
posited the existence of an occult code that would enable communication with
spirits and angels. Trithemius possessed and pored over the key medieval magical
manuscripts in circulation at the time. Through his writings elements of the medieval
grimoires, which otherwise remained unpublished until the modern era, found their
way into print. Agrippa dedicated his own opus De occulta philosophia, later known as

48 | War against Magic

his Three Books of Occult Philosophy, to Trithemius. It contained a rich distillation of
the celestial wisdom to be gained through the practice of natural magic, ceremonial
angelic communication, and Kaballah, and the occult sympathies that united the
material and elemental worlds. He had written a draft of this around 1 5 10 but he only
had it published in Antwerp in 1533. By this time he had, like other prominent
Renaissance mages, already publicly disavowed and condemned such 'vain sciences'
as Kabbalah, magic, and alchemy, along with a more extreme denunciation of
astronomy, geometry, and arithmetic. This makes his decision to publish his early
views rather curious.

The impressively named Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombatus von
Hohenheim (1493— 1 541) was a German-speaking contemporary of Agrippa.
Paracelsus, as he was thankfully better known, was a Swiss physician whose
experiments and ideas regarding medicine, alchemy, astrology, and celestial
magic were hugely influential across Europe. 12 Very few of his writings were
published in his lifetime, and, as with Agrippa's Opera, the corpus of works
bundled together and edited after his death probably contains some that he did
notwrite. 13 Of the supreme mysteries of nature, translated into English in 1655, mayor
may not be one such pseudo-Paracelsian work. Its contents certainly reflected
Paracelsus's views on the division between good and bad magic. It contained
instructions on how to create a series of metal lamens engraved with occult
symbols and secret words of power, each effective against specific medical condi-
tions. 'Characters and Seals have likewise in them wonderful virtue, which is not at
all contrary to nature, nor superstitious,' he explained. Conjuration was another
matter altogether, and in Of the supreme mysteries 'Ceremonial Nigromancers' are
denounced as 'arch-Fools, and ignorant men of no worth!' All conjurations
'are against God, and are contrary to his word'. 14

Despite their denunciations of 'vain' and demonic magic Agrippa and Paracel-
sus became the two most reviled and misrepresented magicians of the era, and the
subject of numerous published attacks. Slanderous and fictitious stories circulated
about their satanic activities. By the end of the sixteenth century the legend that
Agrippa kept a demonic familiar in the shape of a black dog was widely believed.
The followers of Paracelsian medicine constantly had to fend off accusations that
he was 'a magician and an impostor who had dealings with demons'. 15 The evil
reputations of both men circulated far and wide. An English pamphlet written in
163 1 by a Buckinghamshire parson attacking the concept of the weapon-salve, a
sympathetic magic technique attributed to Paracelsus whereby wounds were
healed by treating the offending weapon with the patient's blood, became a
wider attack on the two occult philosophers. Paracelsus was declared to be 'a
Witch and Conjurer' and Agrippa's books of occult philosophy denounced as
being 'stuffed with Conjurations of the divell'. 16

War against Magic | 49

The Judgment of GOD fliew'd upon Di\ John

CM Of, Fortune my FvC.

aictniS'banb Cnttt'P.

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i tyoto 3! am pIuitB'b in pain, But c.snot bit,
t litfb a life the lihe bib none befo*.
forfaiting €b?ift, anb -J am Damn's H'crtfojc.
at Wirtcnbur&h, a Zoteu in Germany,
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Ci-rnWb 3ff6un tire Bolp »ilile Booh,
j)o) on <0eS'0 IBojb tboulb efcts after loch,
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SSfjich twus tfit Coureut nn 1 utter ©amnatiost.
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5Snb Oreigfit to mp flenitefi l)« bib agree.

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-JPongO Pltntf s«.?Xt^,an0 manp a
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Fig. 1 Dr Faustus depicted in seventeenth-century literature.

The diabolic reputations and legends surrounding both men were further
coloured by association with the hugely popular legend of Dr Faust or Faustus
and his tragic relations with the Devil. An itinerant magician named Georg Faust
certainly existed, though his sketchy history has been obscured by confusion with
other men bearing the same surname. 17 He was a contemporary of Agrippa and
Paracelsus who developed a reputation for diabolic magic in several German states
in his own lifetime. Complaints about him pop up here and there in the books and
letters of humanists and occult philosophers of the period. The earliest reference
to Faust is in a letter written by Trithemius in 1507, in which he is also identified

50 | War against Magic

as one Georgius Sabellicus, 'who dares to call himself the prince of necromancers,
is a vagrant, a charlatan, and a rascal'. In 15 13 the humanist Konrad Muth wrote
that he had heard one Georg Faustus bragging at an inn about his prowess as a
fortune-teller. Martin Luther made a reference to him in 1537. After his death,
around 1539-40, perhaps in Luther's Wittenberg, Faust became a magnet for a
variety of old legend motifs of magical escapades and diabolic pacts that transmit-
ted orally and in print around central and northern Europe.

The crucial step in the demonizing of Faust was the publication in German in
1587 of a book regaling stories of his mischievous magical career; how he conjured
up and made a pact with Devil, and ultimately ended up being torn to pieces by
his satanic master — a fitting end, of course, for all those who dabbled in the
magical arts. The 1587 Faust book fed on the popularity of teufelsbilcher or Devil's
books in German popular culture during the second half of the sixteenth century.
They sold in their thousands, and were mostly Protestant in authorship. Both
humorous and scary in tone, they related and depicted the Devil's many ways of
exploiting and ruining sinners. One of them published in 1553, Der Zauber Teuffel
(The Devil of Magic), which contained a woodcut of a magician conjuring in a
circle, directly influenced the 1587 Faust book. Such literature was not unique to
the German states, and so it is no surprise that the sensational tale of Faust was soon
translated into other languages, and disseminated widely in learned and popular
culture. The legend's enduring influence was further sealed by the Faust plays of
Christopher Marlowe and Goethe. 18

Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Faust may have been contemporary magicians but
they were very different characters, with divergent and antagonist positions
regarding the nature and practice of magic. Yet the three of them were tarred
with the same diabolic reputation, and all three would have their names associated
with grimoires of the darkest magic. Faust's time would come in the eighteenth
century. It was the name of Agrippa that found itself on the title page of the first
true grimoire of the print age.

New wave, old waves

The first edition of The Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, in Latin, was produced in
Marburg in 1559, and another edition appeared in Basel six years later. X) Subse-
quent editions were often printed in the Opera, a collation of real and spurious
works by Agrippa, along with the Heptameron, and Ars Notoria. 20 Although a
former pupil of Agrippa named Johan Weyer would later protest that the Fourth
Book had nothing to do with his late master, for demonologists it was the real
thing, the proof that Agrippa had been deep in diabolic magic all the time. 21

ftettrj Qornelm tjgrippa*:-
h i s

Fourth BOOK

O F

Occult Philofophy.

GEO MAN C I E,

MAGICAL ELEMENTS
of Feter <k Abano*

ASTRONOMICAL Geomancie.

The NATURE of SPIRITS.

Aksatel of MAGIC K.

The Species or feveral Kindes of M a g i c k.

Tranfiated into Englifts
By Roeert Turner, Fbib^Ued.

LONDON;

Printed by J.c. for T h o. Rook s, at the Lamb and
Ink-bottle at the Eaft-end of S.Pauls. 166$.
wbert *lfo the beft Ink far Records if to bef lid.

Fig. 2 First English edition of the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy-

52 I War against Magic

Copies quickly began to circulate across Europe. The Elizabethan mage John Dee
owned the 1559 edition and brought it with him during his travels around central
Europe in 1583. 22 By the late 1580s manuscript versions were passing through the
hands of less well-connected Italian magicians. A Neapolitan treasure hunter
named Michele Navarra purchased a copy amongst a bundle of magical manu-
scripts he bought for the considerable sum of thirty-eight ecus of gold. Another
Neapolitan was found with a copy along with a manuscript of Clavicule of
Solomon. One of the charges against a young man prosecuted in Normandy in
1627 included the possession of a grimoire and 'asking a student for a book by
Agrippa'. 24

The first English version only appeared in 1655, published by the Cambridge
educated astrologer-physician Robert Turner. Scholarly magicians would have
already obtained a Latin edition, and so the purchasers of the English text were
probably a mix of the intellectually curious and professional astrologers and
cunning-folk. Its swift notoriety is evident from a 1678 pamphlet attacking
ignorant 'ass-trologers', 'piss-prophets', and 'starr- wizards'. The author described
the standard consulting-room decor and accoutrements of such people, advising,
'let your Table be never without some old musty Greek or Arabick author, and the
4th book of Cornelius Agrippa 's Occult Philosophy, wide open, to amuse spectators.'
A decade or so later the clergyman Richard Baxter recorded, 'I had a very Godly
Friend, that a Week ago told me, that he read Cornelius Agrippa's Occulta
Philosophia, and read the same Words that he saith will raise Devils.' This was
almost certainly the Fourth Book, and as his conscientious friend avowedly detested
the book, 'nothing appeared to him'. The son of a minister who came to see
Baxter in a state of terror was less fortunate. He had also read a book of
conjurations to make the Devil appear; he duly did, urging the young man to
slit his throat. 23

The Arbatel was another work included in editions of Agrippa's Opera, and it
appeared in the English edition of the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy. It was
concerned with the hierarchy, nature, and governance of the spirit world, and
what the spirits could teach mankind. According to the Arbatel, between the years
1410 and 1900 the ruling prince of spirits was Hagith who had 4,000 legions of
spirits under his command. He possessed the knowledge to convert copper into
gold, so he was a spirit alchemists were likely to be familiar with. Following on
from Hagith's reign, Ophiel is the current governor of the spirit world. He also
has alchemical powers, but can also make men live to three hundred, and more
modestly he can cure the dropsy. Although editions of the Arbatel appeared
bearing dates in the early sixteenth century, the first edition, in Latin, was actually
printed in Basel in 1575. German translations were soon circulating in manuscript
form, usually attributing it to Paracelsus. As to its real author we know nothing,

War against Magic | 53

though he was clearly learned in medieval and Renaissance magic and a follower
of Paracelsus and Hermeticism. There was also a degree of invention as well as
heavy borrowing. It included spirit names unknown in the previous literature that
would find their way into popular grimoires of the eighteenth and nineteenth

. • 26

centuries.

The publication of the Arbatel in Basel scandalized the town's theologians. The
pastor Simon Sulzer denounced it from his pulpit. Calls were made for the printer
to be punished, though there is no evidence that any other action was taken. 27 In
1 61 7 senior members of the Protestant University of Marburg investigated the
curriculum being taught at the town's school by the Paracelsian and Rosicrucian
schoolmaster Philipp Homagius and his colleague Georg Zimmermann. A search
of their lodgings revealed copies of the Arbatel printed in editions of Agrippa's
Opera, and it transpired that they had even intended to introduce the Arbatel as a
school textbook. In his own copy Homagius noted, 'I wrote this and was happy to
complete it on 4 May 1617. This book deals with the way how to evoke spirits,
and how we may obtain our familiar spirits; amongst their tasks it is to provide
longevity and to prolong life by 300 years.' A copy was also found on a student
who was so absorbed in it that for more than a year and a half after having been
expelled he did not attend any lectures, 'nor was he inclined to do so'. 8

This first wave of print grimoires emanated from Protestant German and Swiss
publishing centres such as Frankfurt and Basel. The long arms and beady eyes of
the papal censors did not reach these Protestant areas. The notoriety of the
Germanic mages, Trithemius, Faust, Agrippa, and Paracelsus, would have also
generated a keen regional audience. But such occult works were not only of
interest to practical magicians and the simply curious. A strong mystical, spiritual
tradition emerged in Protestantism during the sixteenth century, most notably
expressed in the influential writings of the Lutheran visionary Jacob Boehme
( I 575 _I( 524), but also evident in numerous other small Protestant sects, such as
those that made their way to America during the late seventeenth century. The
Neoplatonic discourses on the angelic and spiritual hierarchies contained in
the Arbatel, Heptameron, Book Three and Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, and the
Steganographia, and the keys they provided to direct celestial communication,
appealed to the prophetic and revelatory aspects of Protestant theology.

It would be going too far, though, to claim that print revolutionized the
European grimoire tradition at this period. It certainly introduced influential
new texts into the canon, significantly increased the pool of available magical
knowledge, and heightened authoritarian concerns over their dissemination and
influence. Yet the continued power and influence of handwritten manuscripts is
clearly evident from the fact that, across much of Europe, the number of Latin and
vernacular copies of the classic medieval grimoires which remained unpublished

54 I War against Magic

in the early modern period multiplied many times. Many handwritten copies of
printed works like the Fourth Book also circulated. It has been said that the reason
for this was because printed editions had no intrinsic value, as high magic required
the ritualized transcription and consecration of each individual grimoire. 29 This is
undoubtedly a significant factor, but increasing numbers of users were not earnest
seekers of magical enlightenment assiduously carrying out the stipulated fastings,
consecrations, and other preparations. They just wanted quick-fix conjurations,
and the basic details on what to say and where to say it. Manuscripts still held an
aura for these people, and their clients in particular, but ultimately there was no
intrinsic difference between print or manuscript versions in using the conjurations
they contained. The fact is that demand for print conjurations outstripped supply
and so manuscripts continued to be produced in their thousands. 30

We get a good idea of the most popular of the old texts from Inquisition trials
concerning the search for buried treasure. In Sicily, which was under Spanish rule
and therefore the jurisdiction of the Spanish Inquisition, we find that the Clavicule
of Solomon and the Lucidarius of Peter D'Abano circulated quite widely, and
treasure-seeking priests such as one Antonio Panayno, investigated in the 1630s,
were instrumental in facilitating the diffusion of such grimoires. 31 A manuscript
called the Gabala Regnum and the Clavicule were found hidden amongst the
mathematical books of a southern Italian treasure hunter and surveyor prosecuted
twice in the 1680s named Nicodemo Salinaro. He told an acquaintance that they
could not only help find treasure but make a man invisible and help him to 'obtain
grace'. In the 1 590s a fraternity of Capuchin friars from Verona were found to be
circulating several prohibited books on magic amongst themselves, including the
Clavicule of Solomon and the Centum Regnum (One Hundred Kings)? 3 The latter,
which appeared variously as the Forty Three, Fifty, or Hundred Kings, consisted of a
list of the principal spirits and their powers, in the tradition of the Testament of
Solomon. It was evidently a popular grimoire in Italy at the time, as was noted by
several Italian inquisitors. A copy was also found in the occult library of a Maltese
notary condemned as a heretic in 15 74. 34

In 1579 the Venetian Inquisition uncovered a five-man team of treasure
hunters led by a nobleman, Giulio Morosoni, who was advised and aided by a
former professor of theology named Father Cesare Lanza. The group made
lengthy preparations including the collection of several magic books, amongst
them a copy of the Clavicule of Solomon solemnly consecrated by Cesare ~Laxizz,
Agrippa's De occulta philosophia, the Lucidario of d'Abano, an unnamed work
attributed to Roger Bacon, and The Forty-Three Kings of Spirits (a version of the
Centum Regnum). One of the team, a former friar and priest, Gregorio Giordano,
described the latter to the Inquisitors: 'there was written there on each page the
name of a spirit, its powers, its characters, and the methods of conjuring it . . . and

War against Magic | 55

among other things there was one who said after his name "I am the God of
Treasure".' 33 Not all the team took seriously the solemnity of the ritual magic
employed by Cesare. One of them told the tribunal that during the consecration
of one grimoire Cesare 'drew the large knife with the right hand and recited the
psalm Exurgat Deus with such vehemence that it seemed he wanted to cut all the
spirits into pieces in that one act, whereupon I wanted to start laughing; I was
dying with laughter so that I could hardly contain myself It is possible, of course,
that this dismissal of ritual conjuration was an attempt to mitigate his criminal
involvement. 36

In Italy the Clavicule of Solomon was clearly the most ubiquitous and widely
circulated grimoire. In early modern Venice versions were available not only in
Latin and Italian, but French, English, and German, or a combination of them.
The same holds true for Spain, and the copy confiscated from a priest in Gran
Canada in 1527 shows that wherever the Spanish clergy were to be found so to
was the Clavicule? 1 That other medieval hit, the Picatrix, circulated less widely,
basically because it provided little practical help in conjuring and controlling
demons. The Book of Honorius was popular amongst the practical magicians and
diabolic dabblers of late-seventeenth-century Paris, but otherwise it was nowhere
near as widespread as the Clavicule.

It is important to point out that in the manuscript grimoire tradition few works
were ever quite the same. There was no founding text, no print template for the
Clavicule for instance. Over the generations copyists added their own personal
touches, taking bits out, adding information from other sources. Apart from the
rare cases where copies were kept by the authorities rather than burned, whenever
the Clavicule or other well-known grimoire is mentioned in a trial record we
usually have little idea as to what it contained or looked like. Some clearly
followed the template of the learned medieval examples. Others might have the
name of Solomon on them but were basically magic scrapbooks, compilations of
practical magic for dealing with witches, causing rain, seducing women, and the
like, culled from manuals of exorcisms, orations, prayers, and oral sources of
knowledge. Some were large, imposing leather-bound parchment tomes, while
others were cheaply bound paper volumes, pocket-sized for ease of carrying and
so that they could be hidden up a sleeve by itinerant cunning-folk. 38 Similarly, the
trial records do not always distinguish between Agrippa's Occulta philosophia and
the Fourth Book, or make clear whether they were a print or manuscript version.

Innovation and invention continued to occur in the manuscript tradition
during the early modern period. When in 1627 an Italian Benedictine monk
named Stefano Peranda fled his abbey after hearing he had been denounced to the
Inquisition he left behind in his cell a manuscript entitled Zecorbeni seu clavicula
Salomonis. 39 As the title suggests, and as two eighteenth-century manuscripts

56 | War against Magic

called Zekerboni in the French Bibliotheque de V Arsenal show, although the title was
novel the contents were basically another variation on the Clavicule. M) Although it
never became a major player, a small number of copies circulated outside of Italy
by the end of the century. As well as the French examples, in 1674 the English
antiquarian John Aubrey translated and transcribed an Italian manuscript Zecorbeni,
which is now in the Bodleian Library. It has been suggested that Aubrey may have
tried out some of its contents. 41

The most interesting aspect of the Zekerboni is that the French copies stated that
they were written by an early seventeenth-century Milanese doctor and occultist
named Pierre or Pietro Mora. Attributing books to mythical doctors was part of
the grimoire tradition, of course, but in this case it was only in the twentieth
century that the mysterious Mora was given a dubious history by Montague
Summers, a widely read author of populist works on the history of witchcraft
and magic. Employing his love of the Gothic, Summers provided a lurid two-page
account of 'this mysterious and menacing personage' who apparently confessed to
the Inquisition that he was 'the Grand Master and preceptor of a band of Satanists,
who with infernal malice were leagued to spread the pestilence by all means they
could devise'. This account was then taken up by other historians, with one
concluding from Summers' account that Mora 'must have been a Satanist'. 42 In
fact there is no evidence of a Milanese medical man of that name having been
executed in Milan for plague-spreading at the time. There was, however, a
barber-surgeon named Giovanni Giacomo Mora who was executed in 1630
after confessing under torture to being part of a plague-spreading conspiracy.
Summers seems to have mixed up the two Moras, and then invented the diabolic
element, for Mora was never questioned by the Milanese authorities about satanic
worship or magical practices. 43

As I indicated earlier, manuscript grimoires, particularly those that increasingly
circulated in popular culture, often consisted mostly of the bricolage of oral and
print sources of practical occult knowledge rather than conjurations and endless
spirit descriptions. Astrological almanacs became hugely popular in the seven-
teenth century, and their lists of good and bad days, weather forecasts, and useful
proverbs seeped deep into the agricultural world of the common people, and were
scribbled into the pages of grimoires. Another very popular print genre was the
'secrets of secrets' whose natural magic mixed with the demonic in manuscript and
later print grimoires. Well known in the medieval period, and with their contents
relying heavily on ancient Greek, Roman, and Arabic texts, these expositions of the
hidden wonders of nature embodied both the intellectual Renaissance fascination
with ancient wisdom and fired and informed the popular imagination of an
expanding readership. They were works of magic only in the sense that they
revealed the secret powers of plants, animals, stones, and the mysterious workings

War against Magic | 57

of natural processes that might otherwise be deemed the result of the magical
actions of magicians or the world of spirits. One popular print example was a
version of the Kyranides. A seventeenth-century English edition entitled The
Magick of Kirani King of Persia contained such priceless information as 'A Weezle's
Tongue dried, and worn in ones shooes, makes all his Enemies to be mute,' and
'For an Alopecia, or falling of the hair; Apply the ashes of little Frogs with Tar.'
Frog was also good for the reverse process, so if you want a painless alternative to
waxing, 'burn the skin of a Frog, and put it into the water of the Bath.' 44

In the print age, the medieval book of secrets falsely attributed to Albertus
Magnus would prove the most enduring, influential, and pervasive, finding a
following across the western hemisphere where it was known to many as the
Grand Albert. Several new publications also emerged with similar commercial
success, though without the lasting notoriety of the Albertus book. The greatest
challenger was the Secreti of Alessio Piemontese. First printed in Italian and Latin
in the 1 550s, and obviously created to build on the success of Albertus, the preface
told how Piemontese, a fictional but not unrealistic archetype of the Renaissance
occult scholar, had gathered his secrets of medicine and nature from his travels
across Italy and the Middle East. Over the next two centuries various editions
appeared in English, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Polish. Amongst
these false and fictional authors the work of the very real Giambattista Delia Porta
(1535— 1615) stands out. This Italian polymath spent a lifetime exploring the
natural world and occult philosophy. 46 Like Paracelsus he denounced spirit
conjuration but unlike Agrippa he never disavowed natural magic. For his pains
he was constantly harassed by the Italian Inquisition. His most celebrated work
Magia naturalis or Natural Magic first appeared in 1558 and subsequently went
through at least twenty editions. Unlike Albertus and Piemontese, Natural Magic
was intended explicitly for an intellectual readership. While it contained much
that was similar to the others it also provided learned discourses on subjects like
optics, and has been characterized by one historian as reading 'like a manifesto for
a new scientific methodology: that of science as a venation, a hunt for "new
secrets of nature." ' 47 Nevertheless, with a title containing magic, the ignorant and
suspicious were quick to make assumptions about dealings with the darker arts,
and although far from it, Natural Magic was sometimes considered a work of
diabolic magic rather than of scientific endeavour.

Almanacs and books of secrets may have seasoned the grimoire recipe, but the
most influential occult products of the print age, exorcism manuals, were often
endorsed by the Catholic Church — at least at first. There had always been lay
exorcists practising a wide range of oral means of dispossession. But the Church's
lack of control over the performance of exorcisms was thoroughly exposed in the
seventeenth century by the proliferation of lay exorcists and maverick clergymen.

Fig. 3 Notebook of the early eighteenth-century Yorkshire cunning-man Timothy Crowther, containing a mix of conjurations, axioms,
weather-signs and astrological calculations.

War against Magic | 59

Catholic Bavaria proved fertile ground for such men and women. One such
practitioner was a pastor named Johann Weiss, the son of a parish priest, who
was charged by the secular authorities in 1579 with practising magic. Weiss had
been in the business of exorcizing people, many of whom believed they were
driven insane by being possessed by the purgatorial spirits of stillborn children. On
being apprehended Weiss was ordered to hand over a suspicious book ostensibly
thought to contain blessings for good weather and exorcisms, but which it was
suspected contained more. It could not be found and Weiss claimed he had lost
it. 48 As this case suggests, and others confirm, a key reason for the proliferation of
such unofficial exorcism was the increasing public access to the many exorcism
manuals in Italian and Latin pouring off the presses of Bologna, Milan, and Venice
during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

The practice of exorcism, which was condemned by the Protestant churches,
was an excellent propaganda tool for the Catholic Church. In his book on the
evils of witchcraft, the French judge and demonologist Henri Boguet included
several chapters aimed at those who mocked the exorcisms of the priesthood. It
contained a series of accounts of how French Calvinists (Huguenots) found
themselves powerless in the face of witchcraft and demonic attack, and ended
up having to resort to the Catholic clergy for succour. 49 Without the power of
exorcism the Protestant clergy had no place on the battlefield against the Devil
and his minions. Yet, as Protestant theologians never tired of pointing out, there
was little or no difference between exorcism and conjuration, as both involved
talking to Devils. The difference depended on whether one accepted the holy
power invested in the ordained priest.

Conjurations were often no more than tweaked versions of the official rites of
exorcism, so it is no wonder that the printed exorcism manuals resembled magic
books in some respects. The Practica of Exorcists, for example, written by a
Franciscan and published in 1586, discussed how the exorcist could communicate
with the demonic spirits in order that their names could be written down above an
image of a demon drawn on paper, which should then be burned. The Hammer of
the Demons (1620) by another Franciscan, Alexander Albertinus, consisted of
passages of Scripture mixed with prayers and conjurations to command and
expel demons. The most influential author of exorcism manuals at this time was
the Franciscan exorcist Girolamo Menghi, some of whose various popular works
were also published in Frankfurt. He produced a series of books with titles like The
Devil's Scourge and the Club against Demons, some of which were produced in
pocket versions, ideal for itinerant lay and ordained exorcists. As inquisitorial and
ecclesiastical records show, in such hands his manuals were used as grimoires for
such purposes as treasure seeking and curing impotency. 50 In 1643, for instance, a
monk named Zorzi used a copy of The Devil's Scourge to conjure up rather than

60 | War against Magic

banish demons and also to consecrate talismans for winning at gambling. 51 The
mid-seventeenth-century exorcism manuals of Candido Brugnoli were central to
the magical practices of a popular Brazilian exorcist and Carmelite friar, Luis de
Nazare, who was charged by the Inquisition in the 1740s. Brugnoli attacked the
practice of touching the female genitalia and breasts during exorcisms, but that is
exactly what Nazare did, even going so far as to copulate with the possessed. The
Inquisition banished him to a remote monastery for five years, forbade him from
forever exorcizing again, but allowed him to remain a priest. 52

Several of these exorcism manuals, including Menghi's, were belatedly added
to the papal Index in 1709, but by this time the Church had been complicit in
spreading the magical use of exorcisms at the same time as its courts were
attempting to suppress lay and ecclesiastical 'superstition'. 53

Print culture also influenced the magic tradition through more subtle path-
ways. A good example of this is the way in which fairies were incorporated into
both the ritual conjurations of Tudor English grimoires and the literary culture
of the early modern stage. 5 In several English sixteenth-century manuscripts we
find the names of fairies among the demonic and spirit names included in
Solomonic conjurations. As one twentieth-century scholar with a jaundiced
view of Continental magical traditions put it, 'It is an extraordinary experience
to follow the dark trail of ritual magic from the Continent (and notably from
Germany) to England, and to find oneself escaping from puerility and squalor into
poetry, fairy-tales and romance.' 55 This highly subjective description was
coloured more by the fairy-lore prominent in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama
than any uniquely poetic quality in English grimoires of the period. The key link
between the two literary traditions was the figure of Oberon, king of the fairies,
who was to be found onstage in Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream and
Ben Jonson's Oberon, the Fairy Prince.

Similar sounding spirits had been mentioned in early sixteenth-century Church
court records. In 1510a priest named James Richardson was accused of preparing a
lead tablet inscribed with the image of a spirit named Oberion. Eighteen years
later a treasure-seeking monk named William Stapleton confessed to having heard
from a friend that the parson of Lesingham and Sir John of Leiston had conjured
up three spirits named Andrew Malchus, Inchubus, and Oberion. 56 By the late
sixteenth century surviving grimoires show that Oberion had become firmly
identified as a fairy rather than one of the legions of other spirits and demons.
A magic manuscript in the Folger Shakespeare Library includes Oberion amongst
a list of eighty-two spirits, and states, 'he teacheth a man knowledge in phisicke
and he sheweth the nature of stones herbes and trees and of all mettall. he is a great
and mighty kinge and he is kinge of the fairies, he causeth a man to be Invissible.
he showeth where hiding treseuer is and how to obtain the saime.' An

War against Magic | 61

early-seventeenth-century manuscript in the Bodleian Library provides instruc-
tions on how to conjure up the fairies and how to call Oberion into a crystal. 57

The influence of Oberon and his transformation into the king of the fairies in
the English grimoire and literary tradition was primarily influenced by the trans-
lation and printing in 1534 of a French romance called Huon of Bordeaux, in which
a fairy king is shrunk to the size of a small child by a curse. The figure of Oberon
subsequently developed through the interplay of print and manuscript literature.
The playwrights' conception of ritual magic was influenced by their knowledge of
manuscript grimoires, and, in turn, stage plays fed back into magical culture,
exciting interest in calling up the fairies. It is surely the work of Shakespeare and
Jonson, and their portrayals of Queen Mab, queen of the fairies, which influenced
the subsequent reference to her in conjurations. She is mentioned in a seven-
teenth-century magical manuscript in the British Library, and the astrologer
William Lilly recalled meeting a magician named Mortlack who professed to
call upon Queen Mab via his crystal ball. 58 Pathways were also opened between
literary and oral cultures of magic. The Revd Thomas Jackson, writing in 1625,
recalled that during his ministry he questioned a parishioner, 'an ignorant soule',
who he knew 'to have beene seduced by a teacher of unhallowed arts, to make a
dangerous experiment'. When asked whether he thought the Devil was at work in
a ritual involving the watching of fern seeds, he replied 'No; it is in the keeping of
the King of Fayries, and he I know will doe me no harme.' The name of the King
escaped him, however, so Jackson 'remembred it unto him out of my reading in
Huon of Burdeaux 59

Democratization

As historians quite rightly revise the 'newness' of Renaissance occultism, the real
revolution has gone largely unremarked — the democratization of high magic. 60
Print was a key factor in the trickle down of literary magic, as was the growing
dissemination of vernacular manuscripts, but both developments were fuelled by
an expanding market for literary magic. But who made up this new readership?

If monks were the grimoire masters of the medieval period, in the sixteenth
century they were in competition with the parish clergy. The shockingly poor
level of education and professionalism of many priests was no secret on the eve of
the Reformation. The pattern of clerical education in 1500 was by no means
uniform, but in the Netherlands only 20 per cent of the clergy were university-
trained and the situation was little better in northern German states. At the same
time literacy had increased in wider society, highlighting more starkly the edu-
cational poverty of the priesthood. Church court records from across western and

62 I War against Magic

southern Europe reveal numerous complaints from parishioners about lax,
womanizing, and drunken village priests.

The image of such dissolute and ignorant clergymen was a favourite of late-
fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century cartoonists and satirists like Erasmus. The
widespread criticism of the parish clergy was certainly a contributory factor in the
discontent that fomented the Protestant Reformation. Church authorities in newly
Reformed states knew that the success of the Reformation depended on a clergy that
was educated and conscientious, and surveys and court records showed they were
not in generous supply. In 1 5 5 1 the Bishop of Gloucester, England, found 168 priests
in his diocese could not even repeat the Ten Commandments properly. 61

The Reformation heralded a major change in the educational status of the
parochial clergy, though it took several decades to get going and recruitment was
initially sluggish. 62 A programme of clerical retraining and education was at the
heart of the strategies of the main Protestant churches. A Danish Church Ordin-
ance of 1627 required all prospective Lutheran ministers to obtain a university
degree. A study of ministers in the Lutheran German duchy of Brunswick-
Wolfenbuttel reveals that, by 1630, 80 per cent were university-trained, though
not necessarily obtaining degrees in theology. In England by the same date the vast
majority of Anglican clergymen were also university graduates. 6 "

The Catholic Church eventually responded to criticism from both within and
without, launching its own reformation of clerical piety and behaviour. While the
Spanish Crown had forced an overhaul of the clergy in the late fifteenth century,
it was the decrees of the Council of Trent, deliberating between 1545 and 1563,
which launched a major renewal of the pastoral activities of the Church. The need
for these Tridentine reforms of clergy and laity was evident to any conscientious
senior clergyman. When, for instance, the Archbishop of Brindisi-Oria toured his
diocese in southern Italy two years after the Council of Trent, he found that in the
town of Francavilla there were nine priests who kept concubines and the arch-
priest could barely read or write. Of nine magical practitioners mentioned two
were clergymen. A survey of the Inquisition records for Modena revealed that the
clergy were defendants in 20 per cent of the trials for 'superstition' between 1580
and 1600. 64 A key Tridentine measure was the setting up of seminaries dedicated
to the education and re-education of the priesthood. The pace of reform was
uneven across Catholic Europe. In the German Catholic prince-bishopric of
Miinster, for instance, a seminary was only instituted in 1626 but it was at least
successful in producing highly educated priests fluent in Latin and trained in the
art of preaching. 65 In France the old criticisms about the clergy were still plentiful
in the early seventeenth century. 66

What has this to do with grimoires? The fact that by the early seventeenth
century the majority of clergy had access to university or monastic libraries as part

War against Magic | 63

of their training meant that they had more opportunity to consult and transcribe
works on the occult sciences. Furthermore, a better-educated parish clergy also
meant a clergy better able to read, understand, and employ the ritual conjurations
contained in grimoires. While even semi-literate Catholic clergy had an advantage
in the magical market through their exploitation of consecrated items and their
ordained status, the ability to exploit literary magic and employ the numerous
Latin exorcism manuals now available — as well as fully understand the Latin
Vulgate — would have further enhanced their status amongst the laity. A better
educated priesthood did not mean a better paid priesthood. There had been a
significant increase in the number of parish priests in some parts of Europe, and
while the wealth of the secular clergy varied widely many were poor and poorly
trained. It is no wonder, as one historian has suggested, that many members of this
'ecclesiastical proletariat' were tempted to use their educational advantage to
explore the money-making possibilities of magic. 67

The sixteenth century also saw the expansion and opening up of other profes-
sions, such as schoolteachers, doctors, lawyers, and military men, which generated
new circles of educated magical adepts. 68 A good example of this comes from the
Maltese Inquisition's investigation in 1582 of how a local doctor named Galeazzo
Cademusto came to transcribe a book of necromancy. It transpired that a Nea-
politan schoolteacher owned the original copy. On being sentenced to a spell in
the galleys, he had passed it on to his pupil, the brother-in-law of a lawyer. 69 With
regard to the ownership of grimoires and the practice of literary magic the medical
profession were, perhaps, the most influential after the priesthood. Until the
second half of the seventeenth century astrology was a widely accepted and
practised component of the medical sciences, and was sometimes a gateway to
experimentation in the magical arts. This is clearly evident from the lives of several
well-known English astrologer-physicians. Copies of medieval texts such as the
Picatrix were found in the libraries of the likes of Simon Forman and Richard
Napier. 70 Versions of the Clavicule also circulated, though sometimes under other
titles. A disreputable Tudor astrologer-physician named Gregory Wisdom inher-
ited a mysterious book from his father described as a 'book in English called the
Practice of DammelT. It no longer survives but a manuscript of Solomonic
conjurations from the period begins with the similar rubric 'Here beginneth the
book which is called the Dannel'. 71

The diaries of Simon Forman (1552— 161 1), a very successful London astrol-
oger-physician, who had his books confiscated on a couple of occasions, provide a
rare insight into how such men considered and dabbled in spirit conjuration
alongside their more respectable occult pursuits. Forman possessed manuscripts
of the An Notoria, Picatrix, and Liber Raziel, and made copies of several of them. In
the late 1580s he began in earnest to contact spirits, and in 1590 noted that he

64 I War against Magic

'wrote a bocke of nigromanti' and had 'entred a cirkell for nicromanticall spells'.
He made at least one other copy of his grimoire, presumably to enhance its power.
He even dreamed about magic books and in one he 'was sore trobled about hiding
of my bocks'. 72

By no means all early modern astrologers were magicians. The astrological and
magical arts were not inseparable, and some astrologers condemned magic out-
right and not just conjuration. Nevertheless, many theologians suspected other-
wise and 'scientific' astrologers were vulnerable to accusations of sorcery. In 1622
Patrick Sinot, an Irish Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Santiago, was
accused of possessing books of necromancy containing magical signs, circles, and
characters, though the evidence suggests his library was purely astrological and
perhaps Kabbalistic. Similarly in 1608 the Catalonia tribunal charged the
astrologer Joseph Sala with practising sorcery and incantations, though the only
forbidden book they found was a copy of an influential treatise by the thirteenth-
century Italian astrologer Guido Bonatti. 73

The clearest sign of the democratization process was the possession of magic
books by artisans, tradesmen, apothecaries, and craftsmen, men who, in the early
modern period, usually had an education and an increasing degree of social and
geographical mobility. This is exemplified by a magical healer named Nicolas
Noel le Bragard, from the town of Nancy, in eastern France. In 1593 he told his
prosecutors, no doubt under torture, how he came to practise magic. Bragard had
begun his working life as a cobbler, and then been a soldier. He was educated and
knew a little Latin. He said he knew nothing of magic books until one day he saw
an acquaintance, one of the town's gatekeepers, with 'a book containing various
recipes, such as to find lost property, to have oneself loved by and to enjoy
women, and others he did not well remember, which made him envious to
acquire that science.' He tore several pages out of the book but desired to know
more. A soldier of his acquaintance possessed another such book but would not
lend it to him. Then he came across a woman who owned some old magic books
and papers kept in a chest. He bought them from her, transcribed them and then
sold them on to a gentleman. He also claimed to have seen a book entitled
D 'occulta phUosophia, which he said he thought was the Fourth Book. He had
tried out a variety of magical rituals contained in his grimoires for 'enjoying a
woman', detecting stolen property, and finding treasure, but the results had been
generally disappointing. 74

In 1623 the authorities in Moulins, a town in central France, arrested and
interrogated a similar character named Jean Michel Menuisier who stood accused
of witchcraft and making a tacit pact with the Devil. He was a practising magician
in his fifties who, after having been sentenced to banishment in 1604 for invoking
evil spirits, said he had travelled in England, Germany, and Spain, where he stayed

War against Magic | 65

in Toledo — a fact that immediately aroused suspicion. During a visit to Vienna he
had purchased a magic phial containing a spirit named Boel, which he consulted
to know occult secrets and therefore help his clients. As well as practising illegal
medicine he confessed that with an accomplice, an apothecary called Sanglant, he
had called up spirits and angels including Raphael to find lost treasures. The
lengthy transcript of his interrogation reveals how the authorities were preoccu-
pied with finding out his knowledge of grimoires. He admitted to possessing a
copy of Agrippa's Opera, and was questioned whether he was familiar with the
Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy. Asked whether he knew Latin he replied in the
negative. His interrogator repeatedly brought up the names of grimoires evidently
of most concern to the authorities. Did Menuisier use the Elementa magica of 'pitri
de appono' (Peter d'Abbano)? No. What about a book called the ArbateR Not that
either, though in further evidence he or Sanglant admitted to knowing four
invocations from it. The Ars Notorial No. He was clearly well versed in grimoire
magic though, and confessed his knowledge of the Clavicula Salomonis and was
asked about the Salomonis Lemegethan. He had also used a virgin parchment
manuscript called the Philippus Attinius onorius consecrated to an angel named
Avenel. This was obviously a copy of the Sworn Book qfHonorius for in reference to
it Menuisier mentioned the assembly of all the magicians in Athens. Towards the
end of his interrogation he explained that when magic had been taught publicly in
Toledo the Spanish Jews had assigned the authorship of magic books to St Paul,
St Barnabe, St Leon, Charlemagne, and Albert le Grand, as well as to Abel, Enoch,
and Abraham. Menuisier was hung and burned for his crimes. 75

Vernacular grimoires also penetrated further down the social scale, though
rarely to labourers and unskilled workers for reasons of cost and literacy. Sheep
and cattle herders had a particular reputation for medical skills and magical powers
due in part to their solitary, peripatetic lifestyle, and close relationship to the
natural and therefore the occult world. 76 In Normandy there were a series of trials
involving shepherds accused of stealing the Eucharist for magical purposes and
other magical practices. 77 A wedding prank in Rouen had dire consequences
when the bride's brother, a shepherd, decided to put on a public performance
of the ligature, a well-known impotence spell involving the knotting of a piece of
cord. As part of the mock ritual his accomplice, a pharmacist named Etienne
Moreau, then made a show of counteracting the ligature with magic read from a
grimoire. The authorities got wind of what had happened and arrested Moreau.
They found in his possession 'a bad book containing many recipes and magical
signs', a paper covered with strange symbols, and 'four pieces of virgin parchment
containing invocations of evil spirits'. 78

While herders were not high up the list of literate occupations in the early modern
period, and occupationally they did not usually require any education other than the

66 | War against Magic

ability to count, the literate shepherd was a figure of respect. The vegetarian and
mystic Thomas Tryon (1634— 1703) learned to read from shepherds, and having
tended sheep in his childhood he noted the wisdom of the shepherd over the learned
gent. The 'Shepherd and Husbandman understand something of Nature; but most of
the Learned are departed from the simple ways of God in Nature, putting out their
own Eyes, and then boasting what Wonders they can see with other Mens.' 79 The
memoirist and one-time excise officer John Cannon recalled how during his
childhood in the late seventeenth century he had befriended a self-taught shepherd
who introduced him to the magical arts of conjuring spirits and possessed occult
books including Agrippa's Occult Philosophy, most likely the Fourth Book. m

There is no doubt that across Europe more and more women had access to book
knowledge considered to be the rightful preserve of men. Protestantism may have
encouraged the limited education of girls, but the general educated consensus was
that their reading material should be restricted much more than men's. In certain
circumstances women and books were seen as a toxic mix. This is certainly
apparent in the realm of medicine. Women had always played an important role
as simple healers, and it was accepted that they had some natural medical instincts in
terms of midwifery, though that was being undermined at the time by the
professionalization of the medical establishment. The idea of women of humble
origin practising medicine informed by literary texts was far less acceptable. This
was undoubtedly increasingly happening, though, and the rather sparse evidence of
it suggests that female healers were usually obtaining their book knowledge from
male practitioners. Amongst the few cases of magical healers prosecuted in eastern
France we find one illiterate woman who said a surgeon for whom she worked
gave her a large piece of paper containing pictures of various herbs. 81 Consider
Temp el Anneke, a healer and diviner from near the city of Brunswick, in the
Lutheran state of Lower Saxony, who was beheaded and burned in 1 664 after being
tortured into confessing to diabolic witchcraft. Anneke, a widow living with her
farmer son, had been to school and could read. Her medical knowledge derived
from several herbal books in her possession, from shepherds and cowherds, and
from her mother who had been a maid to a barber and medical man. 82

Similar pathways of transmission also enabled women to access grimoires. In
1739 a treasure-hunting schoolmaster's daughter, who lived near Stuttgart, con-
fessed that a Capuchin monk had shown her a book written by Jesuits that
provided instructions on how to summon a 'treasure man'. 8 " Anne Bodenham,
a Wiltshire cunning- woman executed for witchcraft in 1653, claimed to have
been instructed in the ways of ritual magic from her time as the servant to the
notorious and influential Jacobean astrologer-physician John Lambe, who was
murdered by a London mob in 1628. Another seventeenth-century English
cunning-woman claimed to have obtained her treasure-seeking knowledge

War against Magic | 67

from William Lilly. Whether this was true or not, the point is that they felt it
necessary to broadcast their relations with well-known male practitioners and the
access that had given them to literary magic. Some prostitute-magicians also had
opportunities to draw on the grimoires possessed by their regular clients. Take, for
example, Gioanna La Siracusana, who had a relationship with the Maltese military
engineer Vittorio Cassar, who, during the early seventeenth century, balanced his
lay membership of the Order of St John with rakish behaviour and magical
practices. Cassar possessed several prohibited magic manuscripts including the
Clavicule of Solomon and a work by Peter d'Abano, which he said he had obtained
from a brass-worker and friend in Messina. He had also learned Arabic from a
Moorish slave who had offered to teach him astrological invocations and necro-
mancy. Gioanna, who claimed she was illiterate, said she knew Cassar had books
and writings on magic and kept them in his home, but said she did not know what
they contained. Once Cassar got wind of the Inquisition's interest in his activities
he hid his books and sent Gioanna to Naples on a trip so that the inquisitors would
not be able to interrogate her. 85 This was a wise decision. Women were thought
less able to resist the wiles and seductions of devils, and their mere propinquity to
grimoires was enough to entangle them in Satan's web. In Cotentin, Normandy,
in 1599, a governess named Therese de Brye claimed to be persecuted by spirits.
On one occasion she said a demon in the form of a big black man had come down
the chimney and mistreated her. The suspicion that she was not a victim to be
pitied but mixed up in diabolic sorcery was confirmed when it was found she had
been in contact with a Clavicule de Solomon and a text called livret des Cavernes de
Tolede (Little Book of the Toledo Caves). 86

With grimoires increasingly filtering down to the social level of cunning- folk,
who provided numerous magical services to assuage the illnesses, fears, misfor-
tunes, and desires of the general populace, it is not surprising that literary magic
came to be an increasingly important component of popular magic. The contents
of some of the grimoires with their Latin, Greek, and Hebrew names were only
partially understood by many cunning-folk, who mostly came from the artisan,
craftsmen tier of society. So in the early modern period the great grimoires of
ritual magic were often not being used for ritual conjuration but as sources for
symbols, phrases, and lists of holy and demonic names. Cunning-folk took
extracts and snippets to construct written protective charms for popular consump-
tion. In the process they took elements of learned magic out of their ritual context
and repackaged them for completely different purposes. In sixteenth-century
Venice, for instance, scraps of paper or parchment with brief conjurations,
symbols, circles, and pentacles taken from the Clavicule were commonly possessed
as protective talismans. 87

68 | War against Magic

Demonologists and debunkers

Concerns about the dangerous spread of grimoires were expressed by intellectuals
from across Protestant and Catholic Europe. King James I and VI of England and
Scotland warned the readers of his Dcemonologie against the evils of the Fourth Book
of Occult Philosophy. 88 The French judge Jean Bodin denounced Agrippa's work,
real and false, as the 'detestable poison of witchcraft'. 89 Writing in 1595 another
French witch hunter, Nicolas Remy, stated that 'Agrippa, Pierre d'Abano and
Picatrix, three masters in damnable magic, have left more prescriptions than is
necessary for the good of men.' 90 Amongst his warnings to pastors about 'super-
stitious' practices, the German Protestant theologian Josua Arndius (1626—86)
included the use of blasphemous books of magic ascribed to Solomon. n The
Jesuit theologian Martin Del Rio believed the spread of grimoires generated two
types of implicit diabolic pacts. The first occurred 'when someone knowingly and
willingly uses those superstitious signs usually employed by magicians, which he
gets either from books or from conversations with magicians'. The second when
'people who, in good faith, read superstitious books, thinking they are by
reputable philosophers and physicians.' 92

Still, there was no unanimous agreement that the possession of grimoires
constituted an act of heresy. Del Rio stated that bishops did not have authority to
burn magic books. They were to be handed over to inquisitors to judge whether
they were heretical rather than merely blasphemous. This sometimes led to
acrimonious disputes. In the 1520s the Archbishop of Toulouse clashed with the
Inquisition over the right to try a doctor and suspected sorcerer named Nicolas de
Beaumont. At issue was whether Beaumont's alleged sorcery was truly heretical
and therefore under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. Under Canonical Law
heresy constituted a transgression of the articles of Faith and the sacraments of the
Church. Not all acts of magic fitted this. Beaumont had been found with books of
magic and diabolic invocations, pieces of mandrake, and small human figurines. To
the Inquisition this certainly smacked of explicit Satanic relations — an obvious
heresy. But the Archbishop's lawyer argued that there was a distinction between
adoration of the Devil and his invocation. Beaumont's paraphernalia indicated the
latter, which did not constitute a heresy unless a pact could be proven. Unfortu-
nately we do not know the ruling of the adjudicating Parlement of Toulouse. 93

Demonological discourses sometimes provide historians with valuable insights
into the content and use of grimoires. As Del Rio explained in his Investigations into
Magic, he decided to bring 'to light some of the most abstruse material from the
books of the magicians themselves, thus revealing their vanity, their perfidy, and
their madness'.'' 4 Without the religious authority of someone like Del Rio,
discussing magic, even with the intent of exposing its worthlessness, could be

War against Magic | 69

interpreted as an act of reinforcing and spreading magical knowledge. Jacques
Ferrand's medical discourse on the cause, diagnosis, and cure of melancholie
erotique, or lovesickness, which was published in 1610, fell foul of the Church in
this way. As part of his survey Ferrand, a respected physician and lawyer, provided
numerous details of spells and charms used to cause impotency, provoke love, and
other related matters. Although he condemned such practices as a matter of
course, he was denounced ten years after its publication by the Toulouse Church
tribunal for teaching occult abominations and perniciously spreading magic, and
copies of his book were ordered to be burned. 95

Those demonologists who expressed scepticism regarding the reality of witch-
craft, and concern over the innocent lives being wasted by the zealotry of witch
hunters like Del Rio, Bodin, and Remy, could be equally vitriolic in their
detestation of grimoires and the users of grimoires. In his De prcestigiis dcemonum,
first published in 1563, Johann Weyer (1515—88), a Protestant Dutch physician
and former pupil of Agrippa, devoted a chapter to identifying and denouncing the
three principal printed grimoires of the period. Considering his close relationship
with Agrippa, he unsurprisingly attacked the spurious Fourth Book of Occult
Philosophy, describing it as 'pure nonsense, an undone broom with straws scattered
everywhere. You can make nothing of it, even if you are an enthusiastic student of
this vanity.' The Heptameron of Peter d'Abano was described as a 'pestilential little
book', which 'should be consigned to Vulcan, among the books that may not be
read', while the Arbatel was dismissed as 'full of magical impiety'. 96 In order to
demonstrate the fallacy of charms, spells, exorcisms, and talismans, Weyer de-
scribed various formulae, rites, and rituals against witches, demons, and ill-health.
This, along with his Protestantism and scepticism, attracted considerable oppro-
brium from Reformed as well as Catholic demonologists. The Catholic Church
forbade his book, and the likes of Jean Bodin accused him of spreading magic.
There was an element of verifiable truth in this. The 1583 edition of De prcestigiis
dcemonum included an appendix called the Pseudomonarchia daemonum, which was a
catalogue of the hierarchy of demons, their powers, and the means of adjuring
them to appear. This was essentially a version of the manuscript lists of demons
that circulated, like the Liber centum, though without any signs or characters. It
derived from a manuscript seen by Weyer called the 'Book of the Offices of
Spirits', a copy of which Trithemius had in his library. Weyer also mentions seeing
an 'abominable manuscript which richly deserved to be burned' in the home of an
influential nobleman. 97 Whatever the original source, this first printed list of
demons represented a valuable magical resource, and circulated amongst learned

98

spirit conjurers.

A slightly altered English version of Pseudomonarchia was published a year later
by the Elizabethan sceptic Reginald Scot in his attack on the fallacies of witchcraft,

70 | War against Magic

magic, and the Catholicism he believed inspired them. Scot, a rather unusual
demonological writer in that he was not a clergyman, lawyer, or physician,
propounded a rationalist view of religion that went beyond Weyer's own more
cautious view on diabolic intervention. Yet Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft was a
treasure trove of magical information, providing spells, Catholic prayers, exor-
cisms, charms, talismans, and rituals on how to communicate with angels, de-
mons, and the spirits of the dead. There were detailed instructions on conjuring
up treasure and how to enclose a spirit in a crystal. One of Scot's main sources was
a manuscript grimoire written in red and black ink entitled 'Secretum secretorum,
The secret of secrets'. It was evidently used by two cunning-men rather than an
occult philosopher. At the beginning of the book was the statement that it was
'invented and devised for the augmentation and maintainance of their living, for
the edifieng of the poore, and for the propagating and inlarging of Gods glorie'.' 0
So Scot produced what amounted to the first grimoire printed in the English
language, and while he did so to prove the worthlessness of its contents he
unwittingly ended up democratizing ritual magic rather than undermining it.
Not long after its publication, the practical magic and protective Catholic prayers
it contained were being transcribed and incorporated into manuscript gri-
moires. 0 The Discoverie 's role as a grimoire was further deliberately enhanced
by the addition of a 'Discourse on Devils and Spirits' to an edition printed in 1665.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries copies of the Discoverie were
being used as source books by cunning-folk and, as we shall see in a later chapter,
there is evidence that treasure hunters in America also employed it. 101

The witch trials

The evidence of the witch trials does not support the demo nolo gists' worries
concerning the explicit relationship between grimoires, witchcraft, and diabolism.
From a historical perspective this is hardly surprising. The vast majority of those
prosecuted and executed for witchcraft were innocent of the crimes they were
alleged to have committed. Furthermore, the practices of those guilty of actually
attempting harmful magic, the vast majority illiterate, were mostly reliant on the
store of oral knowledge regarding image magic and the like: books were not
required to perform simple maleficium. That said, books were found on a small
percentage of the relatively few cunning-folk who found themselves prosecuted
for witchcraft under harsh secular laws, rather than appearing before ecclesiastical
courts that dealt with the lesser crime of 'superstition'. There are a couple of cases
in the Scottish trial records. One of them was a healer named Bartie Patersoune,
who used herbal remedies, healing waters, and charms to cure sickness and

War against Magic | 71

counter bewitchment. Some of these spells and remedies were written in a
manuscript which contained a SATOR AREPO word square, occult diagrams,
and symbols. He was executed in 1607 for 'the crime of sorcery and witchcraft, in
abusing of the people with charms and diverse sorts of inchantments, and
ministering, under the form of medicine, of poisonable drinks'. 102 In the Swedish
witch trial records there are also very few references to magic books. Likewise, a
study of the records in the Alpine Jura region revealed 'practically no traces
anywhere ... of magicians taking their recipes directly from books'. In other
parts of eastern France a few cases have been found. There was a doctor from
Gray, Franche-Comte, charged in 1606 for, amongst other crimes, having books
of magic in his house, and a former executioner of Neuchatel who in 1668
admitted copying 'charms and diabolical practices' from a Gothic-lettered printed
book dated 1602. 103 This was almost certainly a German edition of Agrippa's
Opera.

The one place in Europe where grimoires did feature prominently in the witch
trials was Iceland. Around 134 trials are known to have occurred in this former
Danish territory, and nearly a third of them involved grimoires, written spells, or
runes and symbols derived from them. 104 Those fortunate enough not be exe-
cuted were flogged while the pages of their magic manuscripts were burned under
their noses. 1 As surviving examples from the period show, the grimoires being
used in this northern outpost of European culture consisted of a very distinctive
blend of Continental magic, with borrowings from Solomonic texts and the like,
and the Nordic runic tradition. There are even some references to Norse pagan
deities. Take, for example, the runic farting spell found in a seventeenth-century
galdrabok or grimoire that had evidently passed through several generations. It
instructed the reader to write a series of runic symbols in blood on white calfskin,

which are to afflict your belly with great shitting and shooting pains, and
all these may afflict your belly with very great farting. May your bones
split asunder, may your guts burst, may your farting never stop, neither
day nor night. May you become as weak as the fiend, Loki, who was
snared by all the gods. In your mightiest name Lord God, Spirit, Creator,
Odinn, por, Savior, Freyr, Freyja, Oper, Satan, Beelzebub, helper,
mighty God, you who protect your followers Uteos, Morss, Nokte,
Vitales.

In 1656 Jon Jonsson, who was burned to death for sorcery along with his father,
admitted carving such farting runes and sending them to a girl. A search of their
houses turned up some grimoires and magical writings, and amongst the crimes
for which they were convicted Jonsson confessed to using a Solomonic sign to
cure one of his calves that had been afflicted by the Devil. 106

72 I War against Magic

Another distinctive aspect of the Icelandic experience is that only ten of the 128
people known to have been tried by the island's highest court were women. 107
This is extraordinary considering that in Denmark and Norway, and in Iceland's
southern neighbour, Scotland, the vast majority were female. 1 One explanation
for this emerges from a comparison with Finland where the majority of accused
were also men, in contrast with trials in the homeland of its Swedish rulers. Maybe
the Norwegian settlers who came to Iceland from the late ninth century onwards
brought with them strong elements of the male shamanic cultures of the Saami,
which continued to shape the magical tradition of Finland and northern Scandi-
navia into the early modern period. 109 We need to be clear though, that although
accusations of simple harmful witchcraft (rather than full-blown Continental
diabolism) were usually the basis of the accusations in Iceland, most of those
accused were not witches but rather cunning- folk orfiolkynngisfolk ('wise people').
The shaman connection may have some mileage, but Iceland's magic was based
much more on literary magic than that of the 'shamanistic', spirit-inspired tradi-
tions of Finland. So why did book magic assume such importance?

Iceland had one of the most impressive literacy rates in early modern Europe,
thanks in part to the comparative ease with which the Lutheran church controlled
and educated a small, albeit dispersed population. The enduring relevance of the
island's impressive medieval literary tradition of the sagas and poetry has also been
cited as an influence. 110 Maybe the strength of the grimoire tradition rests on this
successful programme of education, and the consequent ability of the vast majority
of men on the island to explore and exploit literary magic for personal as well as
commercial gain. On several occasions in the seventeenth century school pupils
were expelled for dabbling with grimoires. 111 Then again, literacy rates were
equally impressive in Sweden, and as we have seen magic books were compara-
tively uncommon in the trials there. So, the importance of rune magic, effective
through the act of depiction, may have also generated a strong tradition of writing
magic in Icelandic popular culture. For both reasons, when neighbourly accusa-
tions of witchcraft formed, the involvement of literary means of inflicting harmful
magic would more likely be suspected than elsewhere in Europe's villages.

The first person to be sentenced for witchcraft in Reformation Iceland was a
minister named Oddur Gottskalksson, who was found guilty of rape supposedly
inspired by the magic contained in grimoires found in his possession. Over a
century later the Reverend Ami Jonsson fled the country and sailed to England
after six parishioners accused him and another man of practising harmful magic. 112
Across Europe, clergymen are similarly occasionally to be found amongst those
accused of witchcraft. In western France the fear of priests employing an impo-
tence spell known as the nouement de V aiguillette (knotting of the cord) during
marriage ceremonies was deeply engrained in popular culture. In 1632 a

War against Magic | 73

clergyman of Azay-le-Brule was repeatedly accused of the crime by a frustrated
married couple, and in 1650 another priest was charged with the crime and for
demanding fees for countering the spell. A few years later a priest took out a
defamation suit after similar accusations. 113

It did not take much for such accusations to become full-blown cases of
witchcraft attracting judicial interest from ardent witch hunters. So it is not
surprising that a clutch of French witch trials concerned the French priesthood
and their grimoires. The French judge Pierre de Lancre gave considerable thought
to the problem of these 'witch priests'. He had tried five of them himself in
southwest France and noted that three others had fled to Spain and Navarre before
he could get his hands on them. He also related the trial of Pierre Aupetit, a
village priest in Limousin, who in 1598 confessed under torture to attending a
witches' sabbat: 'he took a certain book there that he read, a book he had later
burned, fearing the authorities. The book was written as a printed text, with
strange words that he did not understand at all.' 114 In 1603 a scandalous Nor-
mandy priest named Godevent was sentenced to be hanged and burned. Amongst
his crimes were the use of a magic mirror for finding lost goods, the possession of a
booklet of twelve to fifteen pages used for countering spells, and a virgin parch-
ment inscribed with magical characters and invocations to call up devils.
Another sensational trial concerned Louis Gaufridy, the priest of a parish near
Marseille, who was executed in 161 1 for 'kidnapping, seduction, impiety, magic,
witchcraft and other abominations'. The case was one of several scandalous
French possession and exorcism cases involving nuns, where the accusations of
witchcraft were caught up in a swirl of political and religious intrigue. One of the
nuns, the daughter of a local nobleman, speaking on her own behalf and that of
the twenty-four demons tormenting her, identified Gaufridy as the witch respon-
sible for her plight. These demons told her exorcists that Gaufridy kept a library of
magic books in his rooms. Acting on this diabolic tip-off, his premises were
searched but nothing suspect was found. Later, languishing in prison, he confessed
to trying to wed the nun to the Devil and of attending a witches' sabbat. As to his
alleged magic books, he said he had burned the one he owned and the ashes could
still be found in the grate. 116

Suspicious minds

The democratization of grimoires through the circulation of print and vernacular
manuscripts, the growth of literacy, and social mobility occurred despite the
concerted attempts to control the book trade. As early as 1475 the Pope gave a
licence to the University of Cologne to censor printers, publishers, authors, and

74 I War against Magic

readers. This tendency accelerated rapidly during the Reformation period, with
secular and religious authorities across Europe producing lists of prohibited books
to prevent the spread of heresies and limit the influence of non-Christian reli-
gions. By far the most influential, though, were the papal Indexes of Prohibited
Books produced from 1559 onwards. The 1559 Index followed a Venetian list
produced five years earlier in banning works of geomancy, hydromancy, pyro-
mancy, and necromancy, but then broadened out to cover all magic arts along
with chiromancy, physiognomy, and other branches of divination. Of those
books specifically mentioned, the most pertinent to our study were the Clavicule
of Solomon, already condemned in the Venetian Index, the books of Hermes, and
the works of Agrippa. A 1586 papal bull of Sixtus V further reinforced the
censorship of books on judicial astrology. 8 As one historian has pointed out,
though, these published Indexes were probably counter-productive in that they
served to inform and excite public interest in the very books of magic they were
meant to suppress. 119 It is possible that the booming market for the Clavicule in
early modern Italy was fuelled in part by its explicit mention in the Indexes.

In 1559 the Spanish Inquisitor General Don Fernando de Valdes ordered the
publication of the first of numerous Spanish editions of the Index, which followed
the papal template closely and included eight Latin works on astrology, Kabbalah,
and the occult sciences. 120 The Spanish Inquisition generated the reputation as
being the most ruthless persecutor and censor of books. Some early historians have
depicted it as being so influential that it retarded Spanish intellectual life until the
nineteenth century. 121 But it was not as effective as some have depicted it, as some
inquisitors pointed out at the time.

During the first few decades of its existence the Spanish Inquisition was mostly
concerned with rooting out heresy amongst conversos — that is, Jews converted,
mostly forcibly, to Christianity. For the inquisitors the possession of Jewish texts
was a sure sign that conversos were secretly practising Judaism, and so a ruthless
campaign of rooting out and burning such books was instituted. As records
show, their owners secreted them down wells and buried them in gardens in order
to evade the Inquisition and the neighbours who spied for it. Yet despite all their
attentions the Inquisition could not prevent Jewish texts being smuggled in from
Italy and the Netherlands. 122 While the Italian Inquisition was primarily set up to
counter the threat of Protestantism from over the Alps, it also targeted Jews and their
books. In 1 5 5 3 many thousands of Hebrew works were destroyed in an orgy of book
burning across the Italian states. Fifteen years later in Venice, a major centre ofjewish
publishing, the authorities instituted another round-up and burned thousands more
copies of the Talmud and other Jewish texts. This occurred despite the fact that the
Index of Prohibited Books issued in 1564 had permitted the Talmud, albeit in an
expurgated form and as long is it was not explicitly entitled the Talmud. 123

War against Magic | 75

The campaign against Jewish books was not only about the heresy of converted
Jews secretly practising Judaism, but also about their perceived and real magical
activities. For many Christians as well as Jews, Hebrew words were in themselves
thought magical, and so for Catholic and Protestant theologians they were
obvious pollutants of the Christian faith. In 1529 the Spanish Franciscan Martin
de Castanega warned,

It is vanity, lack of faith, superstition, and even a judaizing trick to use the
name of the ancient Hebrew in Catholic and Christian invocations as if
the old names were worth more than the new ones. They are especially
dangerous for those with little knowledge, because they may say other
unknown and diabolical words with those Hebrew and Greek ones. 124

In fact, to expunge potent Hebrew holy names from the Christian vocabulary
would have required the censoring of many Catholic exorcisms. The Hebrew
magic word AGLA, for example, which is an acrostic of the phrase 'You are
mighty forever my Lord', was used in numerous Catholic exorcisms, including
those of Menghi, as well as being a common magical name in grimoires. It was this
synergy that inspired Martin Luther to lump together and denounce the 'word
magic' of witches, Muslims, Catholics, and Jews. 125

Suspicions about the use of Hebrew texts emerged in the early seventeenth-
century French court intrigue that led to the execution for witchcraft of Leonora
Galigai, one of Maria de Medici's ladies-in-waiting. Her friendship with a
Portuguese Jewish doctor and occultist named Philothee Montalto was consid-
ered highly suspect. It was alleged that she had talked at length with him regarding
the magic and talismans contained in Hebrew 'grimoires' that had been found at
his home. She denied the charge but to no avail. 126 There were, of course, Jewish
cunning-folk just as there were Christian and Islamic ones, each using their
respective religious texts for healing, divination, and making protective charms.
Written amulets have been described as constituting 'the most powerful elements
of Jewish magic'. Their contents were not necessarily Kabbalistic. They usually
referred to the angels, and contained biblical quotes, pentacles, hexagrams, zah-
lenquadrats or magic squares, and pentagrams. Here is one brief example that was
to be written on parchment in order to win favour:

Hasdiel at my right, Haniel at my left, Rahmiel at my head, angels, let me
find favour and grace before all men, great and small, and before all of
whom I have need, in the name of Yah Yah Yah Yau Yau Yau Yah
Zebaot. Amen Amen Amen Selah. 127

They were, then, very similar to non-Jewish written charms, but the fact they
were written in Hebrew was their unique selling point for Christians. In 1643

76 | War against Magic

Domenico Temponi told the Venetian tribunal that a Jew had taught him that to
find hidden treasure he should write Hebrew words on a piece of paper and place
it under the wing of a white cockerel. 128 Where Jews were allowed to practise
their faith, as in the Venetian ghetto, Christians also consulted them. Take Isacco
Levi, for instance, a Venetian Jew accused by several Catholics of detecting stolen
property by magical means. One said he had seen in Levi's room books of magic
including a work by the medieval Spanish mystic Raymond Lull, the Proverbs of
Solomon, and most curiously a Kabbalistic manuscript attributed to Pope Urban
VIII. Levi was also accused of making copies for sale. The Inquisition called in a
converted Jew to assess the content of the books and manuscripts they confiscated
from Levi, and he concluded that none of them were openly magical. 129

A Jew practising magic was not heresy but a converted Jew doing likewise was
a quite different matter, and of great interest to the Inquisition. One who came to
their attention was a poor, restless convert called Giovanni Battista Bonaventura,
who was tried for heretical blasphemy in 1632. He had converted to Islam before
then converting to Christianity, leaving his Jewish wife in the ghetto. Giovanni
was another of those many men dissatisfied with their modest place in life and
who desired a way to instant wealth. Before his baptism he had confessed to the
officiating priest that he had wanted to find treasure, and handed over a basketful
of magic books and writings to be burned. He also admitted to owning some 'little
books' in Hebrew on astrology, dreams, and medicine. Fortunately the Inquisi-
tion decided he was no heretic and he was given a spiritual rather than corporal
punishment for his religious vanities. " 0 The Spanish Inquisition continued to
keep its eye on such people right to the end of its existence. In 1776 the Barcelona
tribunal investigated a weaver named Juan Soler accused of being a 'heretic,
stained with Judaism because of the Hebrew words he combines with conjur-

> 131

ations .

Moriscos, that is, converted Moors, were another heretical 'enemy within' that
preoccupied the Spanish Inquisition in particular. The possession of any sort of
Arabic texts led to suspicions of secret Islamic worship. The tribunal of Saragossa
alone investigated nearly one hundred moriscos for carrying alherces on their person.
These were small pieces of paper or parchment containing verses from the Koran
that served as protective talismans. 132 Whether this proved they were practising
Islam is another matter, for Spanish Christians also employed alherces. Due to its
geographic position and naval importance in the Mediterranean, Malta was
another region where Arabic magic permeated Christian society. There were
around 3,000 Muslim slaves on the island at the end of the sixteenth century, due
largely to the crusading activities of the knights of the Order of St John. The
Italian-run Maltese Inquisition kept a close eye on their contact with islanders.
Muslim slaves were in particular demand by the island's treasure seekers. Islam was

War against Magic | 77

outlawed and so the only ones ostensibly practising were the enslaved or crypto-
Muslims who risked persecution from the Inquisition. During the early seven-
teenth century the Canon of the Mdina Cathedral dug up part of his basement
believing former Jewish occupants had buried a treasure under his house. Finding
nothing he followed the advice of a Cypriot Greek that he should consult a certain
Muslim galley-slave. The slave brought a book with him and began to read from it
as he paced the basement. His consultation revealed that to obtain the treasure the
ritual sacrifice of a black hen was required. After handing over some valuables, the
Canon eventually realized he was being defrauded. Unfortunately for the clergy-
man the Inquisition got to hear of what had been going on. 133

For the Catholic Church, Protestantism may have been a diabolic heresy but it
was not seen as inherently magical. Yet the authoritarian control of printing in the
Mediterranean was closely tied to the Protestant threat, and Spanish disquiet over
the leaky Pyrenees shaped enduring perceptions of the source of illicit magic and
grimoires. In 1569 an inquisitor in Catalonia remarked, 'an inquisitor is needed
here in order to frighten the people from France.' The concerns were justified
to a certain degree. During the second half of the sixteenth century numerous
Frenchmen sought work across the border in Spain, particularly in Catalonia and
Aragon. Amongst them were numerous print workers, many of whom were
trained in the major publishing centres of Lyon and Geneva, which also happened
to be centres of Calvinism. The authorities' fears were also exacerbated by reports
of concerted efforts to flood the country with Reformist literature, such as the
testimony of a Catholic merchant in 1568 that he had seen large numbers of
Protestant books stacked in Lyon awaiting transit to Spain. On the western side
of the Pyrenees the situation also caused considerable concern. In 1609 the abbot
of Urdax in the Basque region complained that on the route from Bayonne in
southwestern France right down to Pamplona there was not one Inquisition agent
in position to examine the mule caravans for heretical books. 135

It should be noted that the French authorities on the other side of the Pyrenees
were hardly inactive themselves. In 1547 the archdiocese of Toulouse instructed
clergy and civil officials to visit all booksellers in the city, and between 1530 and
1560 the Parlement of Toulouse charged some forty people with possessing
heretical books. The authorities were particularly suspicious of anyone associated
with Geneva, and a royal edict of 155 1 instructed that those bearing books from
Calvin's city were to be prosecuted 'as heretics and disturbers of public peace and
tranquillity'. 136

Protestantism was not the only heresy the Spanish authorities feared from the
north. Over the centuries inquisitors dealt with numerous French magicians and
treasure hunters. In 151 1 a priest named Joan Vicente and three conspirators were
tried for sorcery by the Saragossa tribunal. Vicente, who was originally from

78 | War against Magic

Perpignan, a French town at the base of the eastern Pyrenees, was in possession of
a copy of the Clavicule of Solomon and other magical manuscripts. They had been
transcribed by a notary named Miguel Sanchez from books Vicente said were
from Rome. One of them was a work called the Clavicule of Virgil, which
contained the characters of a hundred demons and the method of conjuring
them. The magicians managed to burn their magic books and manuscripts before
the Inquisition got their hands on them, and Vicente and Sanchez later escaped
from prison. The frustrated inquisitors burned them in effigy instead. 137 In 1668 a
French Franciscan was condemned to three years reclusion by the Saragossa
tribunal for possessing forbidden books and treasure hunting. At the end of the
century the Inquisition tortured and questioned a young morisco healer named
Jeronimo Espinel from the village of Torrellas, who had been engaged in exor-
cizing the possessed. He claimed he 'had read much in Castilian universities,
including the Pentacles of Solomon'. More to the point, he had also acquired
magical knowledge from two Frenchmen who aided him in finding buried

138

treasure.

Concerns over the spread of witches and magicians from France reached fever
pitch in 1609 when a major witch hunt was launched in the neighbouring Basque
French region of the Pays de Labourd. One of the two judges who zealously
pursued the investigation, Pierre de Lancre, described how witches 'were fleeing
in great numbers both by land and sea . . . and the crowd at the frontier grew larger
by the hour. They professed to be travelling pilgrims on the way to Santiago.'
Two French agents were sent into Spain to try and find and arrest one suspected
female ringleader of the witches. The local inquisitors, although fairly sceptical
regarding the accusations against the fleeing French witches, were concerned that
this foreign invasion would still 'do great harm' to the realm. 139

The fear of magical traffic was not all one way. Throughout the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries French demonologists had blamed foreigners, Savoyards
and Italians in particular, with introducing and spreading the plague of witchcraft
and sorcery across the kingdom. The French lawyer Jean Bodin (1530—96)
identified one such source of diabolic infection. 'In the year 1568,' he declared,
'the Italians and Spaniards going to the Low Countries carried notes full of
sorceries that had been given them as guarantees against all misfortunes.' 140 He
was referring to what is known as the Spanish Road, the hugely important military
and trade route running down eastern France to northwestern Italy, which was
crucial for fuelling the Spanish military occupation of the Low Countries. Such
suspicions over foreigners and the viral texts they carried were born out by cases
such as that reported in a pamphlet in 1610. It related how the Parlement of
Bordeaux had arrested four itinerant Spaniards, three men and a woman, for
being magicians and witches. The group had apparently wandered all over Italy,

War against Magic | 79

Flanders, and France offering their services, and stood accused of killing livestock
and harming crops. When the authorities searched their bags they found 'several
books, characters, notes, wax, knives, parchments and other items used in magic'.
They said they had learned their magical arts in Toledo. 141 As we have seen,
tensions across the southwestern border were high at the time due to the witch
hunt carried out by de Lancre. While the Spanish authorities were concerned
about witches fleeing in their direction, de Lancre warned of the Spanish saluda-
dores or cunning-folk coming the other way to make money from curing witch-
craft. This was compounded by the many Moors making their way across the
Pyrenees after a mass expulsion in 1609. De Lancre described one saludador named
Dom Pedro who was active in the region around the town of Bayonne. 'I don't
know if he was one of them, or whether the Great Moor Satan had left him in this
country to take advantage of its people,' he said. Dom Pedro managed to evade
the French authorities and de Lancre pondered whether 'he returned to Spain to
tell the other saludadores that it would do them no good to come to France.' 142

The Inquisitions clearly failed to control the flow of magic manuscripts. In fact
they circulated more widely then ever before. A decree of the Congregation of
the Holy Office issued in 1573 ordered the burning of all books of magic
confiscated and archived by the tribunals because the numbers of them were
becoming unmanageable. 143 This fact in itself shows how the Church was losing
the battle. They were, however, pretty effective in controlling the development
of the printing industry, in Spain in particular. Yet the restrictions merely led to a
flourishing Spanish language publishing industry outside the country and the
development of smuggling operations that funnelled large numbers of forbidden
Spanish books produced by printers in France, Germany, and the Netherlands. 144
In Italy, which was not a unified country and therefore had no centralized secular
authority other than the Papacy, it was one thing for the Church to issue edicts
about inspecting and suppressing booksellers but they were not necessarily carried
out with any real conviction by the various city-states and principalities. In
Venice, for instance, the printed works of Agrippa could be purchased to order
from booksellers who used their contacts abroad to smuggle in copies. One
such Venetian book dealer, Pietro Longo, had previously worked in Basel and
Strasburg. In 1586 he obtained a work by Agrippa for a Bolognese visitor to
Venice, and admitted to giving another Agrippa to a nobleman, and a book by
Peter d'Abano to a ducal secretary. His son in England was one of his suppliers.
Longo paid a terrible price for trading in such books and was drowned on the
orders of the Inquisition in 1588. 145 Such harsh punishment evidently did not
work as a deterrent. Several Venetian occult booksellers were investigated in the
1640s, including Boniface Cabiana who was reported to deal 'in C. Agrippa and a
book with little signs and secret circles'. 146 Furthermore, Italy and Italians seem to

80 | War against Magic

have been an important source of the Agrippan works and grimoires that circu-
lated in Portugal in the period. 147

The legacy of the Inquisitions is evident from the fact that while the boom in
populist publishing during the eighteenth century led to a massive proliferation of
cheap grimoires, little was produced in Italy or Spain: the flow of books was
decidedly from north to south. In Protestant countries and in Catholic areas where
the Inquisition did not operate, the ecclesiastical and secular authorities had a
much harder time in controlling the expansion of illicit magic publishing.

Loving it

Towards the end of the sixteenth century the Inquisitions' attentions began to
shift away from heresy towards 'superstition' and moral crimes. Both of these were
embodied in the activities of prostitutes who not only engaged in illicit sexual
behaviour but also used and traded in magic. 148 Some offered to ensure the
gambling success of their clients. In 1627 one man testified to the Venetian
tribunal that a prostitute had told him how to conjure the soul of Judas to reveal
the names of the victors in a forthcoming election. 149 But it was love magic that
generated the most concern. As one inquisitorial manual explained:

To make men come to their dwellings they perform many sortileges [acts
of sorcery]. They sweep the hearth, they cast salt in the fire, they bless
beans, they tie ribbons into knots while they are at Mass. And while
making these knots they pronounce unknown words, but lascivious and
most indecent against this holy sacrifice. 150

Finding out what these 'unknown words' were and where they learned them
was one of the tasks of the inquisitors. An ordinance of the Milan tribunal in 1605
listed as a particularly female problem the profane use and false attribution of
prayers to Saint Daniel, Saint Martha, Saint Cyprian, Saint Helen, and others. 151
The prayer to Saint Martha to provoke love was particularly widespread across
the Mediterranean during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Legend had it
that, after Christ's Ascension, Martha, who was the sister of Mary Magdalene and
Lazarus, travelled across the sea to Tarascon in Provence, where she killed a
fearsome dragon called la Tarasque and introduced Christianity to the people. 152
The nature of the prayer's content was revealed during an inquisitor's visit to
New Granada (Trinidad) in 1568, where he investigated the activities of a magical
practitioner named Maria de Medina. She possessed a written copy, which ran:

War against Magic | 81

My Lady Saint Martha, worthy you are and saintly. By my Lord Jesus
Christ you were cherished and loved; by my Lady the Virgin Mary
you were hosted and welcomed. To the mount of Talarcon you went
and beheld the live serpent; with your hyssop of water you sprinkled
it and with your holy girdle you bound and delivered it unto the
people. Just as this is true, bring so-and-so unto me, who was the
person she desired to come to her, calm, placid, and bound of hand
and foot and heart so that he should love me and call me his lady and
take pleasure in no one, if not me. 153

Literacy rates for women remained stubbornly low in Spain and Italy. A study
of the early modern Inquisition records of Toledo indicates that some 87 per cent
of women were illiterate over the period, and a similar figure has been estimated
for women in sixteenth-century Italy. 154 But women, even illiterate women,
were evidently taking advantage of literary magic and print culture, servicing both
a female and a literate male clientele in the love magic market. This is most
evident from the lively trade in cartas di voler bene, as they were known in Italy.
These were pieces of paper or parchment on which prayers, spells and magical
symbols were written and their power was activated by it touching the person
desired. 133

A study of prostitutes investigated by the Inquisition in Modena reveals that
although magical orations and charms were learned orally and, as one said, were kept
'always in her heart', those who could read were thought to be the most skilled in the
art of love magic. Written copies accrued more potency than those held in oral
memory, while those recorded in books were more efficacious than charms written
on loose sheets. In 1600 a noted female love magician was described as reading from a
big book with 'a black cover, which is full of incantations and secrets'. One prostitute
said the prayer she had written on a piece of paper was less effective than another
possessed by a courtesan who obtained hers from 'a book in which there are lots of
these things'. 36 At the top of this hierarchy of texts was print, and the Modena
tribunal heard several cases of prostitute love magicians requesting printers to
produce versions of the prayers they knew. This may have been in part to render
their power more potent, but the sale of such mass-produced prayers also proved an
excellent money-spinner.

There were many female love magicians who were not prostitutes of course,
and one of the most well known in mid-seventeenth century Venice was Laura
Malipiero, who ostensibly obtained an income running a boarding house. When
Inquisition agents searched her premises they found written spells and herbal
books, but it was the several copies of the Clavicule of Solomon in various stages
of completion, which included sections on 'sacrifices for spirits and how to

82 I War against Magic

sacrifice', that most interested them. Although Laura said she could not read and
that they belonged to one of her lodgers, it is likely that this entrepreneurial
woman was involved in the city's thriving black market in grimoires. Another
well-known Venetian cunning-woman, Lucia Barozzi, possessed a parchment
protective charm containing pentacles, circles, and the names of spirits, and had
many copies made to sell on to clients. 157

So the high rates of illiteracy were not a barrier to the exploitation of literary magic,
but the vast majority of grimoires still continued to rest in the hands of men rather
than women. The illiterate could make play of possessing grimoires, deal in them,
and have charms copied from them for resale, but they could not, without aid,
actually employ much of the magic they contained. The male dominance of treasure
hunting, for instance, has more to do with the lack of most women's ability to read
grimoires than any engrained gendered division of magical practice in society.

The Devil's book

When questioned by the Inquisition, Father Cesare Lanza, the treasure hunter we
met earlier, spoke freely about what he saw as the diminished power of ancient,
high magic, and made the telling comment, 'Today a lowly little woman does
more than all the necromancers accomplished in the ancient world. Moreover
there is not a person who is not wearing some kind of charm with characters.' 158
Maybe he was thinking in terms of the role women evidently played in simple folk
magic, but Lanza was speaking at a time when the witch persecution was in full
swing, and demonologists found in the witch trials ample evidence that women
were more prone to the temptations of the Devil — the inspiration for all magic.

Across Europe many accused witches confessed, often but not always under
torture, that they had made a pact with the Devil. This was what the authorities
wanted to hear as it confirmed their theological fears of a global satanic conspiracy.
Judging from the evidence of the confessions, which were usually shaped by the
leading questions of judges and magistrates, there were several ways in which the
pact was sealed. Being seduced into sex with the Devil was common for female
witches, and the act of the Devil making a secret, indelible mark on the body of his
servants was also widely assumed regarding witches of both genders. In parts of
England the adoption of suckling spirit familiars became another vehicle of
perpetuating satanic relations. 59 The concept of the written pact between witches
and the Devil has received less attention from historians, and yet throws up
interesting questions about contemporary views of women, literacy, and books.

The trial evidence shows clearly that the learned and popular conception of the
witches' written pact was distinct from that of the classic Faustian pact. The latter,

War against Magic | 83

an almost exclusively literate male crime, was an act of ritual magic involving the
drawing up of a contract by the pact maker that was then presented to the Devil.
The usual scenario regarding primarily female witches was a reversal of this
process, in that it was the Devil who presented a book or parchment to potential
witches and tempted them to sign it. In other words the witch was not the
instigator in this pact and there was no bargaining involved. As with sex, the
Devil seduced women into signing it.

The signing of the Devil's book or parchment is a comparatively uncommon
means of pact-making in the trial records of Continental Europe. The most
influential example, and one repeated by several seventeenth-century demonol-
ogists, concerned the charge against fourteen women executed for witchcraft in
the papal territory of Avignon in 1582: 'that [so] the Father of Lies should have a
care to delete and obliterate you from the book of life you did at his direction
and command with your own hands write your names in the black book there
prepared, the roll of the wicked condemned to eternal death'. 160 As this
suggests, then, the Devil's book is basically an inversion of the biblical notion
of the Book of Life mentioned in the Old Testament and most prominently in
Revelations in the New Testament. 161 So while the Book of Life is a record of
all the righteous elected to salvation by God, or contains the names of those for
whom Christ died, the Devil's book is a ledger of damnation. One's name
cannot be in both.

Most women at the time were illiterate, so the act of signing the book would
have limited this diabolic strategy. The English clergyman Richard Bernard (1568—
1641), who was heavily influenced by Continental demonological writings, ob-
served that the Devil's pact was 'uttered either by word of mouth, of such as cannot
write; or in writing by others'. 162 There were ways around the literacy problem.
The Devil could offer a helping hand of course. In 1645 a Norfolk woman
confessed that the Devil in the guise of a tall black man conversed with her one
moonlit night and cut her hand with a penknife; she wrote her name in his book
with the blood, her hand being guided by him. 163 Just as with legal documents at
the time, the illiterate could also sign themselves with a cross. One of the women
accused at Salem said the Devil in the guise of a black man 'brought a book & she
touched it with a stick that was dipt in an ink home & it made a red mark'. 164 In
English cases it is mostly the Devil who actually puts the names of the witches in his
book, the physical link required to seal the pact being enacted by writing with the
witches' blood. Anne Leach confessed that the Devil drew blood from under her
tongue with which he wrote her name on a piece of paper, while Margaret Wyard
said he fetched blood from her thigh and wrote on a paper with it. Intriguingly we
find a similar preponderance of such accounts in the witch trials of eighteenth-
century Hungary. One woman prosecuted in 1746 described how the Devil

84 I War against Magic

dressed in a blue caftan 'hit her in the nose, with the blood issuing from there he
entered her name in a book', and another accused witch said the Devil entered her
name in his book 'with a pen dipped in blood from her little finger'. 165

Parts of eastern Hungary were Calvinist and it is possible that if such cases were
mapped on to the region's confessional map, they might confirm a direct con-
nection between the Devil's book and Calvinism. It is certainly the case that most
examples of written witch pacts in England were recorded during the Puritan
ascendancy of the Civil War period, and in particular during the East Anglian
witch hunt orchestrated by the puritan witch-finder Matthew Hopkins between
1645 and 1647. It is likely the written pact became more prominent at this time
due to the Puritan parliamentary emphasis on signing or marking oaths and
covenants, such as the Protestation Oath of 1641, the Vow and Covenant of
1643, an d the Solemn League and Covenant of 1644. Those who took these oaths
or covenants were required to swear them aloud and then sign their names or put
their marks in columns on a parchment, roll, or book containing the oath or
covenant. For this reason they are important documents for assessing literacy rates
at the time. 166 While these covenants were inspired by national political agendas
they represented personal commitments, symbolizing individual battles with
conscience, and the tormentor Satan. Those who broke them were repeatedly
warned of God's judgement. It is understandable, then, that in Puritan-influenced
popular cultures at this time entering into 'a solemn league' with the Devil would
be conceived as much in terms of a written as a sexual pact. 167

Although the Devil's book was not a grimoire the two were easily conflated in
the minds of the suspicious, particularly with regard to women. If, as some
demonologists believed, the mere possession of grimoires constituted an implicit
pact, the Eve-inspired curiosity of women would more likely lead them to explicit
relations with the Devil. This notion is evident from the 1653 trial of the Wiltshire
cunning-woman Anne Bodenham. To impress her clients she made a lot of the
fact that she possessed books of magic. These were used to help her clients, but
once she was accused of witchcraft the possession of occult works became
associated with the Devil's book. Languishing in gaol she wearily confessed that
she had a red book which 'was written half over with blood (being the names of
witches that had listed themselves under the Devil's command)'. 168

Colonial fears

One might have thought that controlling the circulation of forbidden books
would have proved a much easier task in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies.
Yet right from the beginning the censors faced serious difficulties in suppressing

War against Magic | 85

the influx of prohibited literature, which arrived not only via Spanish and
Portuguese ships but also traders from France and the Low Countries, the main
sources of illicit Spanish publications. An inventory of books to be shipped by a
dealer in Seville to Mexico in 1600 included works by Delia Porta, Albertus
Magnus, Alexis Piemontese, and Paracelsus. While none of the titles were
explicitly magical in nature, these were names that would have immediately
aroused the suspicion of any ecclesiastical censor. 169 Furthermore, colonial eccle-
siastical libraries that housed forbidden books were frequently robbed. 170 Those
with good social standing did not need to go to such lengths as they could apply to
consult the libraries on pious or legitimate scientific grounds. The doctor Cristobal
Mendez, tried for sorcery by the Mexican Inquisition in 1538, testified that he had
learned the art of making silver and gold astrological medallions for health and
fortune from books he had read in the cathedral library in Mexico City. 171

A permanent Inquisition was never established in the Portuguese colony of
Brazil, so a Visitor General was sent there to try cases three or four times on
lengthy visits between 1591 and 1650. The first couple of visits were motivated
primarily by concerns over the activities of conversos and, to a lesser extent, the
influence of Protestantism and Islam. But dozens of cases of magic and 'supersti-
tion' were also heard. A detailed study of trials in the Brazilian province of
Pernambuco between 1590 and 18 10 reveals that of 692 crimes heard by the
Inquisition 57 concerned witchcraft and magic, but only 3 concerned the posses-
sion of prohibited books. Most concerned Portuguese colonists rather than
indigenous peoples or African slaves. Cases of female love magic were prominent,
along with witchcraft and magical healing. Seven people came forward to de-
nounce one Maria Goncalves, for instance, who they accused of carrying the
bones of hanged criminals to protect herself from the authorities, and with
speaking with demons. 172

On the other side of the continent, in Peru, the Spanish set up a tribunal in
Lima, which tried some three thousand people or so during its existence. Twelve
per cent of them concerned magic and 'superstition', mostly involving the lowest
strata of society, including slaves and poor women, particularly midwives and
prostitutes, amongst whom written and oral prayers to Saint Martha were popu-
lar. 173 Several monks were investigated for making diabolic pacts. In the 1580s
printed and manuscript books of chiromancy were found on a priest named
Fernando de Cuevas, chaplain of the city's Carmelite convent. Its most famous
defendant was the famed Spanish sailor and explorer Pedro Sarmiento (1532—92),
the author of The History of the Incas, and one-time captive of Walter Raleigh's
fleet. He found himself hauled before the Lima tribunal on several occasions. One
time he was accused of having books of magic and prayers that allowed him to
invoke the Devil, and on another occasion of possessing magic rings and magic ink

86 | War against Magic

which made love letters irresistible to their female readers. A Neapolitan named
Jeronimo de Caracciolo was also accused of possessing books of magic. But the
only concrete evidence of the use of a grimoire in Peru concerns an embroiderer,
Diego de la Rosa, who was accused of necromancy in 1580. 175 He possessed a
manuscript in his own handwriting 'with many characters, Greek and Hebrew
letters and other evil things', which he had lent to others to make copies. Its
contents contained a familiar blend of spells and conjurations to attract women, fly
through the air, become invisible, and find hidden treasure. The pig-tailed de la
Rosa's other crime was spending too much time with native Indian witch doctors
who instructed him in the use of magical herbs.

In terms of the flow and quantity of forbidden books in circulation in the
Spanish Americas it was the Mexican censors who had the most work to do in
stemming the tide. A fascinating insight into the challenge they faced is provided
by the story of the library of Melchor Perez de Soto, a Mexico City architect
arrested by the Inquisition in 1665, charged with practising astrology and sorcery,
and owning prohibited books on the subject. The Inquisition confiscated 1,592
volumes, which meant that Perez de Soto must have had one of the most
extensive private libraries in the colony, particularly for someone of a relatively
modest social position. A fifth of his books consisted of fables, novels, poetry,
treatise on language, and the like, mostly in Spanish but also some in Latin, Italian,
Portuguese, and French. Books on mathematics, astronomy, military science,
architecture, medicine, religion, and history formed a major part of the rest of
the collection. As to the charges against him, he certainly possessed numerous
learned discourses on astrology, two works on physiognomy, and an early
sixteenth-century treatise on alchemy.

While still under investigation Perez de Soto was killed by his prison cellmate.
The Inquisitorial censors sifted meticulously through his books, identifying those
that could be returned to his widow, those that needed to be expurgated, and
those that were to be confiscated and destroyed. Most of the expurgated volumes
were works of astronomy. The censors identified ten works that required further
investigation. One of them was della Porta's book on cryptography, De occultis
literarum notis. They probably suspected that it contained information similar to
that in his Natural Magic. Of the books clearly forbidden there were several on
judicial astrology, but none were titles that contained conjurations. Some were
withheld because they committed the offence of not stating the date, publisher,
and place of publication, while others were published in such heretical places as
Amsterdam. An Italian edition of Piemontese's Secrets caused some consternation
to the censors as only the Spanish edition was listed in the Spanish Index, while a
book falsely attributed to Peter d'Abano led to some head scratching. 76

War against Magic | 87

Less innocent was the library and activities of Pedro Ruiz Calderon, who
arrived in Mexico over a century before Perez de Soto's tragic experience with
the Inquisition. Ruiz Calderon, a priest, was a boastful chap and a charlatan who
sometimes passed himself off as a papal legate or inquisitor. On his arrival in
Mexico in the late 1530s he had been quick to broadcast his vaunted skills in the
art of magic. Rumour had it that he could make himself invisible, that he could
magically transport himself to Spain and back at will, and that he had power over
women. Regarding the latter, his powers of invisibility came in handy while
fleeing cuckolds. He said he accrued much of his knowledge during a sojourn
in the Levant where he had trained amongst wizards and received lessons in
Chaldean, Hebrew, and Greek. Then there was a further trip to Germany to
take an apprenticeship in alchemy, and on to Paris to learn how to cast out
demons. Ruiz Calderon had brought his library of occult works with him, one
of which he claimed contained the signature of the prince of Devils which he had
obtained in Italy during a brief descent into Hell. In the somewhat claustrophobic
world of colonial Mexico it was perhaps inevitable that such boasting would soon
attract the attention of the Inquisition. In 1540 Ruiz Calderon was arrested and his
books confiscated. As in Perez de Soto's case, the censors closely scrutinized them.
As befitted a priest, there were pious works and breviaries, Dominican sermons
and philosophical works. They also found a copy of Albertus Magnus's Secrets, an
exorcism manual, and a book by the thirteenth-century scientist and alchemist
Arnold de Villanova, probably the Treasure of Treasures. Apparently no identifiable
grimoires were found, and certainly not the one containing the Devil's signa-
ture — much to the inquisitors' disappointment. Ruiz Calderon got off fairly
lightly, being sentenced to banishment in Spain and prohibited from saying
Mass for two years. Immediately after the sentencing, however, he had to be
taken to hospital. As the concluding paragraphs of his trial records note, this
irrepressible and foolish boaster continued to regale his fellow inmates with stories
of his magical accomplishments and told of other books of magic in his possession
that had not been confiscated. 177

Despite suspicions and accusations most of the occult books in the early
colonies seem to have been divinatory rather than magical, with almanacs and
learned astrological treatises circulating quite widely across Spanish America. 178
This may help explain the surprisingly few cases of magical treasure hunting heard
by the overseas Inquisitions. Ruiz Calderon certainly boasted of his ability to
discover pre-conquest treasures and claimed several conquistadors had hired his
services for this purpose. In 1622 the Lima tribunal heard the case of two men
accused of using sorcery to uncover treasure hidden in Inca burial grounds. 179 But
otherwise Diego de la Rosa is a rare case. He confessed to using his grimoire
during an expedition to uncover a treasure that a native Indian had informed him

88 | War against Magic

was buried in a mountain together with the entrails of an Inca chieftain. De la
Rosa dressed in a ceremonial white tunic with a green stole, and used incense, wax
candles, and four pomegranate wands during the conjuration, but to no avail. 180 A
recent major study of witchcraft and magic in colonial Brazil also notes magical
treasure hunting as an uncommon activity. The author recounts the case of
an eighteenth-century slave and magical healer from Rio de Janeiro named
Domingos Alvares who the Inquisition exiled to the Algarve in 1744. Only
once settled in Portugal did Domingo begin to specialize in detecting legendary
buried treasures attributed to the Moors, and conducting spirit conjurations while
wearing a white sheet. 181

In the English colonies of North America a commercial book trade also began
with the arrival of the first settlers. Bibles and pious works obviously predomin-
ated, but university-educated men also brought over larger collections of scientific
and philosophical works, and hidden amongst them occult texts slipped their way
into the new territory. Indeed, the first governor of Connecticut, John Winthrop
Jr (1606—76), a practising alchemist, possessed a wide range of esoteric works.
Emigrating from England in 163 1 he brought over with him some 1 ,000 volumes,
and continued to build up his collection in his new home, most notably obtaining
some books owned by John Dee. 182 There were also books on Paracelsian
medicine, Rosicrucianism, and astrology amongst the many tomes on theology
and personal piety in the library of the wealthy Virginian clergyman Thomas
Teackle (d. 1696). He owned the alchemist Thomas Vaughan's, Magia Adamka
(London, 1650), John Heydon's The Rosie Crucian infallible axiomata (London,
1660), and 'Magica natur', which was probably a copy of Porta's Natural Magic. 183

Just as in the Spanish and French colonies, the authorities in New England tried
to control the book trade to prevent the Puritan population from being contam-
inated by the ungodly literature that they saw as plaguing England. To this end the
Massachusetts General Court empowered four ministers to 'allowe or prohibit
printing'. 184 It was easy at first to control the nascent American print industry, but
once again censoring the flow of books from abroad proved an impossible task
without instigating a ruthless stop-and-search policy. Profane chapbooks contain-
ing light-hearted romances, ballads, and the like were no doubt carried in the
packs of emigrants and traded by sailors, as were astrological almanacs and
divination manuals. Mention of such texts cropped up occasionally in the witch
trials of New England. Literary occult knowledge could also be transported in the
mind as well as on the page. During her trial in 1669, for example, Katherine
Harrison of Wethersfield, Connecticut, a wealthy woman who had arrived in
America around 165 1, said she had learned fortune-telling from reading
'Mr Lilly's book' while living in England. 185

War against Magic | 89

Astrological and other divinatory guides were not grimoires, but in the purit-
anical environment of early colonial America the possession or knowledge of any
book with occult content could generate suspicions of something more satanically
sinister. The blurring of devilish magic and astrology in the minds of the religious
authorities was made worse by the likes of the New Haven reprobate John
Browne, who was tried in 1664 for 'pretending as if he had some art to rayse
the divell'. From the detailed account of his trial it would appear he did not, but
nevertheless had fun scaring an acquaintance, Eliakim Hitchcock, by pretending
to do so by drawing up a horoscope. Hitchcock told Brown he did not think that
could be done, but Brown swore it was possible but threw his astrological figures in
the fire saying that the Devil would have come otherwise and torn the house to
pieces. 6 The danger of such conflation is all too apparent from reading the
evidence against Dorcas Hoar, who was caught up in the Salem witch trials of 1 692 .

The Revd John Hale testified that twenty years or so earlier, stories had
circulated that Dorcas was a fortune-teller and possessed a book on palmistry.
Hale confronted her about it, telling her 'it was an evill book & evill art.' Much to
his satisfaction she renounced such practices, but some years later the wicked book
apparently made its appearance again. Hale's daughter, Rebecca, said that she
knew Hoar had been involved in thefts from the house but had not told him of it
because Hoar 'was a witch & had a book' by which she could divine whether she
told her father. Rebecca said that she had seen Hoar's book, '& there were many
streaks & pictures in it by w'ch (as she was told) the said Hoar could reveale
secretes & work witchcrafts.' Thomas Tuck confirmed that he had also seen the
book 'w'th streaks & pictures'. So a simple work on palmistry, through fear,
rumour, and ignorance, had become a grimoire. The Reverend now launched a
hunt for this evil presence. He strongly believed that witches made their pacts by
signing a Devil's book. Some in his community who were plagued by diabolic
spectres said the book was 'represented to them (as to them it seemed) with
threatnings of great torments, if they signed not'. 187 Hoar's husband admitted that
his wife had borrowed the book from a lodger named John Samsons but had
returned it some twenty years earlier. Hoar questioned Samsons, who said he had
owned a book on palmistry when he lived with the Hoars but had sold it at Casco-
Bay many years earlier. 188 No doubt Hale experienced a sense of frustration of
such proof being beyond his grasp.

So did grimoires circulate in early colonial popular culture? Were they being
used as they were back in England? In Essex County a servant girl was accused of
threatening another that 'shee had a book in which she could read and call the
divill', and in 1652 a man was accused of saying he had made contact with the Devil
after 'he read in a book of magic'. 189 These are likely to have been idle threats or
slanderous comments rather than proof that manuscripts of spirit conjuration were

90 | War against Magic

being read. Despite the strong puritanical influence over early settlers it would
seem that it only took a little more than a generation or so for cunning-folk and
fortune-tellers to become firmly established in America. 190 Yet, at least until the
last years of the seventeenth century, there is little evidence that they possessed
anything more than divinatory works. It was the fear that diabolic grimoires were
circulating, rather than the reality, that nurtured the prominence given to the
concept of the Devil's book during the devastating Salem trials of 1692.

Around fifty of those accused of witchcraft during the Salem episode confessed
to signing the Devil's book to seal their pact, forty of them women. 191 It has been
suggested that this preoccupation related to authoritarian concerns over the recent
growth of America's printing presses and the production of explicitly astrological
almanacs from the 1680s onwards. We can find an analogy for this in the
eighteenth-century Hungarian witch trial material. One woman who confessed to
pacting with the Devil described how the Devil wrote her name in a book 'that
looked like an almanac'. 1 '' 3 At the same time, the popular conception of signing a
Devil's book might also have been influenced by the New England Indian land
speculation bubble of the 1680s, during which many people had the experience of
signing land purchases with the Native Americans, who some saw as diabolic
agents. One Salem woman told how the Devil in the guise of a 'Tawny man' or
Indian, had presented her with a piece of birch bark, 'and she made a mark with
her finger by rubbing off the white Scurff'. 194 Further analogies have also been
made with the popular experience of frontier traders' account books in which
customers' credit and debt were recorded. This echoes the register-like nature of
the Devil's book and the spiritual debtors who signed it. 195 Indeed, it was
recorded of one of the Salem suspects that the Devil temped her with a 'Book,
somewhat long and thick (Like the wast-books of many Traders', butt bound and
clasp't, and filled not only with the Names or Marks, but also with the explicit
(short) Covenants of such as had listed themselves in the Service of Satan'. 196

Because of their religion and their social status, seventeenth-century New
England colonialists had a significantly higher literacy rate than those in the
country they left — around 60 per cent male literacy compared to less than 40
per cent in England. 197 For the same reasons they had a more intimate and
complex relationship with literary culture. The Devil's book was a sign of the
times. In the early 1690s the puritan preoccupation with the ever-present Devil
mixed toxically with authoritarian fears over the influence of profane popular
literature, particularly on women. It seems likely that this was coupled with
popular anxieties raised by the experience of signing — not oaths of allegiance as
in Civil War England, but speculative legal and financial documents. Even at this
early stage the commercial was evidently a match for the spiritual impulse in
American society.

War against Magic | 91

A rude shock

Fears over the aristocratic use of magic to plot against monarchies had been a factor
in the rise of witchcraft, but at the dawn of the so-called Enlightenment sensational
evidence of the widespread use of magic and grimoires in the court of Louis XIV
sealed its decriminalization in France. Towards the end of the seventeenth century
the worst of the excesses of the witch hunts were over in Western Europe thanks to
increasing judicial circumspection about the evidence required to prove the crime.
The trials ended earlier in France than most of the Continent. The last person to be
sentenced to death for witchcraft by the parlement of Paris, one of nine regional legal
jurisdictions in the country which oversaw justice in most of northern France,
occurred as early as 1625, and only a trickle of cases were heard after that. Trials and
executions took place in greater numbers and later elsewhere in the country, and in
the early 1670s the central government in Paris was required to intervene in the
affairs of other parlements to ensure that rigorous judicial procedures were applied in
cases of witchcraft. 8 It was all the more shocking, then, when the royal court was
exposed as being the country's hotbed of diabolic activity.

In 1678 the lieutenant general of the Paris police, Nicolas de la Reynie, began
to uncover circumstantial evidence of a plot to poison Louis XIV. For a couple of
years Reynie had been investigating the activities of poisoners following the
scandalous case of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, who was beheaded for poisoning
her brothers to get her hands on the family fortune. The more the Paris police
delved into the murky world of the supply and administration of poisons in the
capital the more it became clear that the trade was part of a wider, thriving
network of professional magical practice. Furthermore, it was not only humble
Parisians who resorted to the homes of fortune-tellers and cunning-folk. Several
practitioners accrued considerable prosperity and influence thanks to the aristo-
cratic demand for their illicit services. Amongst those caught up in the affair was
the famed general the Due de Luxembourg, and one of Louis XIV's mistresses,
Madame de Montespan, who was at the centre of the web of suspicions. Male
courtiers were particularly enticed by the magicians' promises of great wealth
accrued through alchemy, gambling, and treasure hunting. While female aristo-
crats also shared these interests, they also supported a thriving trade in love
powders and potions to ensure the faithfulness of their husbands or lovers. The
modern-day obsession with plastic surgery also had its venerable parallels, with
magical cosmetics and medicine being purchased to improve complexions and to
enlarge breasts. As well as feeding aristocratic greed and vanity, the magicians also
provided such sinister services as the disposal of unwanted babies, giving rise to the
title 'angel makers', and providing poisons or 'inheritance powders' to do away
with detested husbands, family members, and rivals. 199

92 I War against Magic

This sordid world of magic was first revealed to Reynie in all its grotesqueness
by the confessions of two sorceresses. One was a tailor's wife named Marie
Vigoureux and the other the widowed wife of a horse dealer, Marie Bosse. As
they began to talk under interrogation and out of revenge, a close-knit under-
world of magicians, fortune-tellers, shepherd herbalists, chemists, and magicians
emerged, and as the police round-up escalated so the grimoires confiscated from
their houses began to pile up in police headquarters. A grimoire called the
Enchiridium was most frequently mentioned in the police records, and its identity
is confirmed by one interrogation where the 'Enchiridium Leonis papaz was men-
tioned. 200 Over forty priests were arrested and it would seem that magic books
circulated widely among them. Numerous grimoires and magical manuscripts
were found in the home of the elderly debauched priest Etienne Guibourg, who
confessed to performing black masses using the stomach of a naked woman as an
altar, and was also accused of sacrificing babies. One of the books in his library was
entitled Conjuration du mirroires magique and there were also numerous papers
detailing rituals for summoning the demon Salam. 01 Grimoires were by no
means restricted to the clergy and their male accomplices. While Bosse could
only write her name and nothing more, several grimoires were found amongst the
papers of her more educated arch rival La Voisin, amongst them The Book of the
Conjurations of Pope Honorius, which contained a series of spells for gambling." 0- A
female magician named Catherine Trianon, who lived together 'as man and wife'
with another cunning-woman, was described as having more learning 'in the tip
of her finger' than others acquired in a lifetime. When her house was searched in
1680 twenty-five manuscript volumes on the occult sciences were found. 203

The Affair of the Poisons was a rude shock to the French body politic. In 1682
Louis XIV ordered the promulgation of a new law to suppress all those 'who
follow the vain professions of fortune-tellers, magicians, or sorcerers or other
similar names'. Strict regulations regarding the sale of poisons were instituted. The
language of the Edict of 1682 also made it clear that magic was a pernicious belief
rather than a real diabolic force. By banishing magicians and their ilk the Edict
aimed to protect 'many ignorant and credulous people who were unwittingly
engaged with them'. The crime of witchcraft was not explicitly mentioned, but
the new law effectively ended the likelihood of further trials under its old
definition. Over the next few decades legislation would gradually appear else-
where in Europe reflecting this fundamental shift from magicians as diabolic
criminals to magicians as frauds. Grimoires were no longer instruments of heresy
but immoral manuals of superstition. In a sense this revised intellectual attitude
towards magic was a return to that of the early medieval period, before the rise of
the witch trials. Then again the Enlightenment was about to cast new light upon
grimoires and those who used them.

Enlightenment and Treasure

The European Enlightenment is often portrayed as heralding the victory of
reason and rationalism over magic and superstition. The spirit world of
Neoplatonism was vanquished and the clockwork Universe ticked for the edu-
cated. The age of miracles was over and the Devil chained to hell. The crimes of
witchcraft and conjuration were redefined as a delusion and a fraud. It was the age
of the Lunar Society in Britain, of Linnaeus in Sweden, of Kant in Germany, and
Rousseau in France. Literacy was increasing across much of western and northern
Europe, and the guiding light of rationalism penetrated further and further into the
minds of the masses through the increased provision of schooling and that defining
Enlightenment publishing institution — the newspaper. But all is not what it seems.

The witch trials were by no means over. They continued in some German
states and Switzerland well into the second half of the eighteenth century. In
Scandinavia people continued to be executed and imprisoned for writing pacts
with the Devil. The Inquisitions of southern Europe investigated hundreds of
cases of suspected magic. Across Europe magical treasure seekers were prosecuted.
For many, educated and illiterate, the Devil and his minions were a continual
threat to body and soul. In late-eighteenth-century Germany a Catholic priest
named Johann Joseph Gassner (1727—79) attracted considerable fame and criticism
for exorcizing thousands of people whose illnesses he believed were demonic.
The controversy he provoked has been described as 'one of the largest and noisiest
arguments of the whole German Enlightenment'. 1

The eighteenth century was also the age of roving occult adventurers, notori-
ous across Europe in their own lifetimes, men who earnestly explored magic and

94 I Enlightenment and Treasure

at the same time exploited the credulity of others in such matters — men like
the Sicilian Giuseppe Balsamo, better known as Count Cagliostro (1743-95). 2
Balsamo had educated himself in Western and Arabic magic and astrology whilst
serving as an apprentice to a monk and experimental chemist named Father
Albert. Expelled from his monastic apprenticeship, and back on the streets of
Palermo, Balsamo made use of his occult knowledge, selling magical amulets and
exorcizing evil spirits. He fled the city after having duped a wealthy silversmith
named Vincenzo Marano into believing he could conjure up a treasure buried by
the Moors. Many more occult adventures followed on his tours across Europe,
including the sensational boast that he had dined with the spirit of Voltaire. 3

Of even more enduring fame was the Venetian Giacomo Casanova (1725—98),
in many ways a true representative of the Enlightenment. Alongside his many
accomplishments as a lover, artist, writer, translator, and gambler, there was
magic. Like Cagliostro, he had amused himself by playing the magician, once
attempting to obtain a treasure buried in the cellar of a house in Cesena, Italy. He
concocted an account of how Pope Gregory VII had intended to conjure it up but
died before doing so, informing his client that 'During a night with a full moon, a
learned magician can raise the treasure to the surface of the earth by placing
himself in the middle of the magical circle called maximus.' 4 His route to
influence in France owed much to his professed skills as an alchemist and
magician. Amongst the magic books he innocently lent to a spying emissary of
the Inquisition were the Picatrix, Key of Solomon, and Zekerboni. It was partly on
the basis of his impressive knowledge of magic that the Austrian nobleman
Count Waldstein, a major patron of art and science in central Europe, employed
Casanova as his librarian during the adventurer's last years.

Both Cagliostro and Casanova were involved in what some might consider
another counter-Enlightenment development in eighteenth-century educated
society: the rise of Freemasonry. The origins of modern Freemasonry are a
fascinating and complex mix of the mundane and the occult. There is no doubt,
though, that ritual magic and alchemy were strong influences on many of those
who joined the various Masonic lodges formed across Europe and America during
the eighteenth century. The private library of the English Rosicrucian and
Freemason General Charles R. Rainsford (1728— 1809) demonstrates the wide-
ranging occult interests of some members. During his travels and dealings he
accumulated manuscript grimoires in German, Latin, Italian, and French, includ-
ing Solomonic works and the Picatrix.

The booming publishing industry in western Europe, which produced news-
papers and pumped out books aimed at the education and moral improvement of the
masses, also fed the thirst for literary magic amongst a rapidly expanding readership.
Obscurantism, the authoritarian impulse to restrict access to knowledge, was alive

Enlightenment and Treasure | 95

and well but increasingly difficult to maintain. While the Mediterranean Inquisitions
continued to exert considerable control, elsewhere the secular and religious censors
fought a losing battle. Nowhere was this more evident than in France and its genre of
chapbooks known as the bibliotheque bleue. 6 During the first half of the eighteenth
century around one million copies of these cheap publications were being produced
a year. They encompassed a huge range of sanctioned and illicit subjects. Amongst
the romances, practical guides to gardening and cooking, lives of the saints, and pious
reflections, we find the darkest secrets of magic laid bare.

Vive le grimoire!

After the Affair of the Poisons and the round-up, execution, and imprisonment of
some of Paris's most notable magicians, the authorities turned a deliberate blind
eye to the magical underworld, leaving the 1682 Edict underemployed. It was no
doubt considered unwise to open up another can of worms that might implicate
the French court. Out of a total of 188 different books seized by the Paris police
between 1678 and 1701 only three concerned magic. 7 Under the auspices of
Marc-Rene de Voyer d Argenson, who succeeded Reynie as lieutenant general of
the Paris police force in 1697, the number of confiscations would increase sign-
ificantly. The new chief of police reignited the campaign against the faux sorciers,
inspired by concerns over their influence on the streets rather than in the boudoirs
of the rich. In 1702 d Argenson wrote a report on the problem addressed to the
King in which he explained how the fortune-tellers and magicians who plagued
the capital were a serious threat to public order. 8 As a consequence, the police cast
their net far wider than they did during the Affair of the Poisons. Between 1700
and 1760 at least 300 such people were either prosecuted or reported to the Paris
police. 9 Amongst them was the usual range of male and female treasure hunters,
diviners, dealers in magical talismans, and diabolists. Grimoires circulated widely
amongst them and the police found copies in the hands of priests, prostitutes,
abortionists, chemists, labourers, and tradesmen — a more diverse social range than
that apparent from Reynie's investigations. Many of their owners had settled in the
capital from all over France, and there was a fair sprinkling of foreigners, particu-
larly Italians but also Germans and Swiss. 10 Some were more far-flung migrants
such as one who changed his name regularly but was commonly known as the
'Turc', and dressed like an Armenian. He claimed to be a master of the spirit
world, sold love powders, and wielded a magical staff covered with what were
thought to be Hebraic characters. 11

In 171 1 a woman named Dequin was put in the Bastille for 'ruining several
bourgeois under the pretext of discovering for them a pretended treasure that she

96 | Enlightenment and Treasure

said was guarded by spirits'. The arresting officer found a parchment on her full of
magical characters, which she said was her sole source of subsistence. 12 Several
'evil books' containing magical characters and spells were confiscated from a
twenty-year-old adventurer named Tirmont who was accused of treasure hunting
and corrupting young girls. 13 In 1702 the man with the biggest reputation
amongst the faux sorciers in the city was a carpenter named Louvet, a man 'deep
in the science of the grimoire', who lived in the Rue du Four. The police reported
that he was rarely to be found with saws and hammers, instead making a healthy
living by treasure hunting and arranging pacts with the Devil. His clique consisted
of a coachman, a fruiterer, a baker, and his wife. 14 There were those who made a
living providing such characters with grimoires. One mentioned in d'Argenson's
report was a man named Jemme, who the police believed was a relative of the
marquis d'Ambreville. This rogue had left his wife and children and taken up with
a prostitute. He also sold consecrated Solomonic pentacles and triangles drawn on
virgin parchment. Another was Le Beau, a master tailor, who sold grimoires
signed by spirits. 15

From the records the Clavicule of Solomon emerges as the most influential
grimoire amongst the Parisian mages. Whether it had grown in popularity since
the Affair of the Poisons, or the police were just more detailed in their examin-
ation of the magic books they confiscated is difficult to say. The Grimoire du Pape
Honorius was the next most popular magic book. In 170 1 we find a diabolist doctor
named Aubert de Saint-Etienne boasting that he possessed copies of both gri-
moires. These he used on numerous occasions to call up the Devil. During one
satanic session with a fellow pact addict, he apparently chopped off the head of a
cat and buried the body in a cellar. They put the head in a pot with seven broad
beans, one placed in each opening in the head, accompanied by the utterance of
various conjurations and the sprinkling of holy water. 16 This ritual for invisibility
could be found in versions of the Clavicule. The Enchiridion Leonis Papa;, Latin
print versions of which had been available for a while, was also popular. In 1745 a
police search of the papers of a well-known disreputable clergyman, the abbe Le
Valet de Rocheblanche, uncovered 'L'Enchiridion du pape Leon, a treatise of
magic in Latin, and different magical characters traced on different pieces of
paper'. 17 The police also confiscated a grimoire entitled 'les vertus admirables des
Psaumes de David', which its owner, a magical healer named Radeville living in le
faubourg de St Denis, was intending to consecrate to the spirit Marcas. In his
report d'Argenson described one of the 'psalms' dedicated to the spirit Prince
Jesnu, the purpose of which was to protect against fire and bleeding. 18 An obscure
text that also cropped up several times in police investigations was dedicated to a
spirit named Membrock or Manbrok. It was reported that in 1700 the treasure
hunter L'abbe Le Fevre, a Capuchin monk who had fled his monastery in

Enlightenment and Treasure | 97

Compiegne, baptized a grimoire in the name of Manbrok. This act was performed
in the church of Noyen-sur-Seine, a village southeast of Paris. A circle was made
around the altar with blessed chalk, and Mass was performed on three successive
nights. La du Castel, a Parisian seller of love potions, was also much occupied with
attempting to conjure up a spirit named 'Membrok', presumably one and the same
as Manbrok. 19

One wonders whether some of these grimoires confrscated on the orders of
d'Argenson found their way into the vast library of his grandson, the marquis
Marc Antoine Rene de Voyer d'Argenson, which formed the basis of the great
French national library the Bibliotheque de I 'Arsenal. Amongst this bibliophile's
collection of manuscripts were four versions of the Clavicule of Solomon, one copy
each of the Enchiridion du Pape Leon and the Grimoire du Pape Honorius, the
Armadel, and one attributed to 'Tosgrec', in other words Toz Graecus, the fabled
author of several medieval occult books. 20

The vibrant magical world of early-eighteenth-century Paris was well known
to Laurent Bordelon (1653— 1710), satirist and chaplain of St Eustache in Paris. 21
He mixed in the intellectual and aristocratic circles that were in Louis XIV's
favour after the Affair of the Poisons. At a more humble level he must have heard
rumours about the various treasure-hunting clergymen operating in the city. One
presumes that it was, in part, this that led him to write, shortly before his death, a
humorous critique of the belief in witchcraft, magic, divination, and apparitions
based around the opinions and adventures of Monsieur Oufle — Oufle being Le
Fou ('the fool') spelt backwards. Constant reading of 'superstitious books' had
tainted Oufle's mind, and made him exceedingly credulous on matters regarding
the supernatural. His belief in magic was also transmitted to his sons. One of them
was a timid priest too honest to turn to magicians. The other, a bank worker, was,
however, seduced by the prospect of obtaining the great riches held out by
conjurers and astrologers: 'When they spoke to him of Devils that could find
treasures, his mouth watered so much that he would not send them away.' 22
Bordelon dedicated a chapter to listing the books in Oufle's library, the best part
of which consisted of the works of well-known witch-hunters such as the Malleus
Mallificamm, Bodin's De la demonomanie des sorciers, and Boguet's Discours des
sorciers. These rubbed alongside several grimoires — the books that such demon-
ologists as Bodin and Boguet denounced and burned. Oufle owned the Grand 2nd
Petit Albert, the Enchiridion, Clavicule of Solomon, and a grimoire that carried a
signature of the Devil at the end. By including both genres in Oufle's library
Bordelon was making the point that they were essentially the same in the sense
that they were founded on credulity and fanned pernicious superstition. Despite
such mockery and the vigilance of the Paris police, France was set to become the
European centre of grimoire production, with global cultural consequences.

98 | Enlightenment and Treasure

It was during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that the cheap,
simple literary format known as the Bibliotheque bleue expanded in France. For a
fraction of the price the wealth of practical occult knowledge contained in the
manuscripts so treasured by the Parisian magicians became available to all but the
poorest in society. Tens of thousands of Bibliotheque bleue grimoires circulated
around the country over the next century and a half. 23 The main centres of
production were Troyes, Rouen, and Paris, and so distribution of the Bibliotheque
bleue was widest in central and northern France until the expansion of publishing
in the nineteenth century. This was also the area of the country that experienced
the biggest increases in literacy during the eighteenth century. 24 It must be
remembered also that many people in France at the time spoke languages and
dialects other than French, and, therefore, the popular influence of this cheap
literature varied widely from region to region.

The role of colporteurs or peddlers was certainly crucial to the spread of
grimoires around the country. They were not mere salesmen though. In their
packs they carried knowledge — knowledge from other places, other worlds. They
had a reputation for knowing a thing or two about magic and medicine, born
partly of their possession of grimoires and almanacs, partly because of the mystique
that accrued to them as strangers from unknown lands. Colporteurs from Oisans, at
the foot of the Alps, for instance, were known throughout France for the
mountain herbs they offered for sale. 23

The popularity of the Bibliotheque bleue was a headache for the secular and
religious authorities. Laws were instituted and reinforced to suppress literature
considered politically and religiously pernicious, and to monitor the activities of
colporteurs. It is not surprising, then, that the publishers of grimoires were loath to
identify themselves. A favourite ruse was to hide behind the fictional publishing
company of Beringos Fratres of Lyon, whose premises were located 'at the sign of
Agrippa'. 6 This was a tradition that stretched back to the publication of French
editions of Agrippa and pseudo-Agrippan works during the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries. Most grimoires were given bogus dates of publication and
spurious places of publication like Rome or Memphis. These served the dual
purpose of frustrating the censors and giving the grimoires an aura of venerable
authority and foreign mystery. They also make it impossible for the historian to
date them accurately.

The earliest magic book in the Bibliotheque bleue genre was the Grand Albert. It
may have been available in printed versions for nearly two centuries, but as part of
the Bibliotheque bleue its publication generated fresh concerns. In 1709 state censors
listed it as a book to be condemned and confiscated, along with a raft of populist
religious works printed in Rouen. 27 Soon, though, the Grand Albert's little
brother, the Petit Albert, a true grimoire, would rise to even greater notoriety. It

Enlightenment and Treasure | 99

SECRETS

MER.VEILLEUX

DE LA

MAGIE NATURELLE

ET

CABALISTIQJJE

DU

PETIT ALBERT,

Traduits cxa&emeni fur P Original Latin.
Intitule:

Alberti Parvi Luci]

LIBELLUS
VIIRABILIBUS NATURjE ARCANIS.

Enrichi de Figures myfterieufes , & de la
inaiiicre de Ies faire.

"Kouvelle Edition conigee augmtnth.

A LION,

?.hes lcs Heiitiers de Beringos F
a l'Enfeigne d'Agrippa.
M DCC LI.

Fig. 4 Edition of Le Petit Albert, title page.

was not attributed to Albertus Magnus, though, but instead to one Albertus Parvus
Lucius. The earliest reference I have found to a magical text of this name is in
d'Argenson's report of 1702, in which it is noted that the principal grimoire of the
magician Radeville was 'Le petit Albert ou le paysan'. 28 This was presumably a
manuscript and one wonders whether it, or a variant of it, was the origin of the
first mass-produced version. An edition of the Petit Albert is thought to have
appeared in Geneva in 1704, though the earliest known French edition was
published in 1706 under the imprint of Beringos Fratres. 29 As Bordelon's account
of Monsieur Oufle's library suggests, by 1710 the Petit Albert had already become a
notorious and successfully popular grimoire in the Paris region. In 1714 a travel-
ling salesman named Ponce Millet, who hawked cloth, clothing, and books
around northeastern France, gave a copy of the Petit Albert, at three livres quite
an expensive book, to his brother-in-law in the Champagne region. 30 Over the

100 I Enlightenment and Treasure

next few decades its influence spread all over France. A colporteur arrested in
Languedoc in 1745, for instance, was found to be in possession of several copies. 31
It is somewhat ironic that these early copies of the Petit Albert are now so rare that
they fetch upwards of a thousand pounds.

The Petit Albert contained a mix of mundane and magical knowledge. There
were the practical tips common to secrets of secrets, such as how to fortify wine and
make vinegar, and medical advice for bad stomachs, urinary problems, fever, bad
breath, and the like. Then there were patriarchal occult tips regarding the control
of females, such as how to know whether a woman is chaste, how to make
women dance naked, and how to prevent women from talking lewdly with
someone. There were charms to ensure success at fishing, such as taking three
limpet shells, writing on them in blood the words 'JA SABAOTH', and throwing
them in the water. It also contained planetary talismans and number squares, and
recipes for magical perfumes. Its most notorious piece of magic concerned the
making of the Hand of Glory, which allowed thieves to enter houses at night
without being caught by stupefying the inhabitants. It instructed the reader to cut
the hand off a criminal who had been gibbeted, wrap it in a burial sheet, then
squeeze all the blood out of it. The hand was to be kept in an earthen pot for
fifteen days along with a preservative mix including saltpetre, salt, and pounded
peppercorns. It was then to be dried by the heat of the sun or in an oven. The
mummified hand was to be used to hold a candle made from the fat of a hanged
man and virgin wax in a manner illustrated by a woodcut. Variants of this
gruesome magical object were known about and apparently put into practice
during the seventeenth century, but it was the Petit Albert that generated the
nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries fascination with the tradition. 32

Bibliotheque bleue editions of that favourite magic book of the Parisian conjurers,
the Grimoire du Pape Honorius, first appeared towards the end of the eighteenth
century. Some of its contents were copied straight from the Petit Albert, including
details of the Hand of Glory. Where it differed markedly from the Petit Albert was
the series of spirit conjurations it contained, which were evidently taken from one
of the numerous manuscript versions of the Grimoire in circulation. One sign of
this is the two conjurations it contains to command a spirit named Nambrot,
which is presumably one and the same as the spirit Membrock or Manbrok
summoned by early-eighteenth-century Parisian magicians. The basis of the
book's popularity was its utility for treasure hunting, providing 'pentacles to
discover treasures' and conjurations to deal with the spirit world. The Petit Albert
contained some discussion on the location of buried treasures, and the sala-
manders, gnomes, and spirits said to guard them, but little practical advice. 33
The author of the Grimoire du Pape Honorius clearly saw a gap in the market.

Enlightenment and Treasure | 101

The Bibliotheque bleue version of that other Parisian favourite, the Enchiridion
Leonis Papce, also appeared in the same period. 34 It contained the usual simple
healing charms, a version of the apocryphal Abgarus letter, and, in the earliest
editions, a set of rather handsome colour engravings of talismans and instructions
on constructing pentacles. Its defining content, though, was its series of talismanic
protective prayers. Some versions of the Petit Albert recommended the prayers in
the Enchiridion to those confronted by spirits when digging for treasure. 5 But
there were prayers for more mundane purposes, such as the following to ward off
foxes:

Say three times a week: in the name of the Father + , and of the Son + ,
and of the Holy Ghost + . Foxes and Vixens, I conjure you, in the name
of the virgin and saint, as Our Lady was pregnant, that you will neither
take nor scatter any of my birds, my flocks, that is to say cocks, hens or
chickens, nor eat their nests, nor suck their blood, nor break their eggs,
nor do any harm to them, etc.

Another to be 'hard', and perhaps meant to counter impotency, was diabolic:

Write on two pieces of paper, with your blood, that which follows:
Ranuc + , Malin + , Fora consummatum est, in te confedo, Satana + ;
swallow one of them, and carry the other around the neck.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Grimoire du Pape
Honorius and the Enchiridion were joined by such familiar works as Les veritables
clavicules de Salomon and the Oeuvres magiques d'Henri Corneille Agrippa, as well as
other more minor titles. In terms of popular influence, though, all these were
overshadowed by the Grand grimoire, which was the first explicitly diabolic mass-
market grimoire. While the first edition has usually been dated to 1702 — before
the Petit Albert — its absence from early-eighteenth-century sources suggests that a
Bibliotheque bleue edition published around 1750 was the first, or at least the most
influential. The Grand grimoire was sensational and dangerous in that it gave explicit
instructions on how to call up and make a pact with the Devil's prime minister in
Hell, Lucifuge Rofocale. Satan had given Lucifuge powers over all the riches and
treasures in the world, and so for French treasure hunters he was the most
important of spirits. The Grand grimoire provided all the instructions, conjurations,
and advice required to seal the pact. The 'Great Call' of Lucifuge began:

Emperor LUCIFER, master of all the rebel spirits, I beg you to favour me
in the call that I am making to your grand minister LUCIFUGE ROFO-
CALE, desiring to make a pact with him; I beg you also, prince Beelze-
bub, to protect me in my undertaking. O count Astarot! Be favourable to

k0

& OUHi-L 74,/ou/u 6. VUAilL-

inJC/krua*^- *****

r 1^ a*

Fig. 5 Les veritables davkuks de Salomon. Eighteenth-century manuscript.

Enlightenment and Treasure | 103

LE GRAND

GRIMOIRE

AVEC LA GRANDE

CLAVICULE

DE SALOMON,
£/ la MAG IE NOIRE , o« Us
FORCES 1NFERN JLES vu
Grand AGRIPP A, four dvcou-
vrirtous IcsTresors caches, &
fe faire obcir a tons les EspriTS ;
Suivide tousles Arts Magiqnes.

M. C C. II.

i

Fig. 6 Le grand grimoire. Eighteenth-century imprint.

me, and make it so that this night the grand LUCIFUGE appears to me in
human form, and without any bad odour, and that he accords to me, by
the pact that I am going to present to him, all the riches I need.

The Grand grimoire was not only a manual for diabolic communication; the
mere possession of it came to be seen as an act of pact-making. In 1804, the same
year that Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, a trial in Amiens deliberated on
the case of a man found with a grimoire, most likely the Grand grimoire, with
which he said he could call up the Devil by merely touching it. A government
official opened the book in public to demonstrate that this was absurd nonsense.

104 I Enlightenment and Treasure

When the Devil failed to appear the man exclaimed that the official must be a
more skilful magician than he to so silence Satan. 36 The founders of the French
Republic espoused the advancement of rationalism, and the state's anticlericalism
was inspired, in part, by a desire to banish the 'superstitions' promoted by the
Catholic Church. The scene in the Amiens court could be seen as representative
of the process of popular enlightenment and dechristianization some associated
with the Republic. On the other hand, it could also be seen as indicative of a wave
of superstition unleashed by the Revolution. People faltered from the true path of
Christian piety and moral sensibilities, leading to an era when blasphemous magic
flourished. Several clergymen writing in the 1790s claimed the Revolution was a
diabolic Freemason conspiracy. For one evangelical campaigner, a century and a
half later, the publication in the early nineteenth century of a new version of the
Grand grimoire under the title of the Dragon rouge was symptomatic: 'After the
French revolution in 1789, a revolution aimed at dethroning God and enthroning
the goddess of reason, this particular book, The Fiery Dragon, became a sinister
substitute to the Bible in some French magic circles.' 7 But while magic certainly
remained as strong a force in popular culture as it had done in the years before and
after the revolutionary period, for the vast majority of Frenchmen and women the
Church also maintained its grip on the masses. 38

The Dragon rouge went on to match the Petit Albert for notoriety. Writing in the
mid-nineteenth century, the historian Charles Nisard described its 'monstrous' and
'bizarre' figures as 'breathing an atmosphere filled with fire, sulphur and bitumen'. It
also inspired a work of the same title that was, in fact, an attack on its pernicious
influence and that of other cheap grimoires. While the Petit Albert had gained its
influence through the travels of the colporteurs, the Dragon rouge profited from the
growth of High Street bookshops during the nineteenth century. One commenta-
tor, writing in 1 861 , noted sadly that it was on open sale in the shop windows of Paris,
'to the great scandal of those who think we are progressing' . ' Other sources confirm
that booksellers had no qualms about openly selling and advertising such magical
merchandise. In 181 8 the avid bibliophile Thomas Frognall Dibdin was sold a copy
of the Dragon rouge during an antiquarian tour of France and Germany. While visiting
Nancy he asked a bookseller and printer if he 'had any thing old and curious?' The
bookseller explained that he had once possessed a splendid medieval missal, then
handed him a copy of the Dragon rouge, saying, 'see, Sir, is not this curious? . . . buy it,
and read it — it will amuse you — and it costs only five sous.' Dibdin purchased two
copies, partly it seems, because he found the frontispiece image of the Devil
intriguing. The bookseller informed him that he regularly sold hundreds of copies
to the country people. 41 In October 1823, the year that a very successful edition of
the Dragon rouge was produced in Nimes, a religious periodical published in its 'case
of conscience' section a letter that had recently been received by a Parisian bookseller

55

SIGRBS ET CARACTERES DES ESPRITS.

LUCIFER.

BELZEBUTH. /^UcS^
ASTAROTB.

SARGATANAS.

NI-iBIROS, ^t^V

Fig. 7 List of devils and spirits from Le dragon rouge (early nineteenth-century edition).

106 | Enlightenment and Treasure

from a correspondent in Normandy. " It explained how one of his friends had been
to the man's bookshop with a soldier garrisoned at Versailles, and bought a copy of
the Dragon rouge. The bookseller had told them that he could obtain other more
powerful works including a French version of Girolamo Menghi's sixteenth-century
exorcism manual Le Flagellum icemonum and the Clavicule of Solomon. The corres-
pondent went on to request one such book that would punish evildoers, avowing
that he would travel many leagues to obtain it. Needless to say, the pious editor of the
clerical periodical denounced the interest in and supply of grimoires. 43

A spin-off from one of the conjurations in the Dragon rouge was La poule noire,
the first known edition of which appeared in 1820. Its popularity was due to the
treasure conjuring ritual of the same name which was notorious in eighteenth-
century France. There were several variations of the tradition. One required the
releasing of a black hen at the treasure site and then sacrificing it. Another
consisted of the sacrifice of a black hen at a crossroads or cross around midnight
in conjunction with a conjuration to call up the Devil. His eminence would, in
return, proffer a black hen that laid gold or silver eggs. Rumour had it that the
wealth of the influential French banker Samuel Bernard (165 1— 1739) was due to
his possession of one such black hen. There is no doubt that the ritual was
practised, as was revealed during the trial in 1775 of a winegrower named Jean
Guillery and several accomplices. These fraudsters gulled at least two men with
the promise of a poule noire that laid money. In one instance they began by asking
their dupe, a man named Fortier, to write his name on a book owned by an
accomplice named Macret, which Fortier described as a grimoire full of strange
figures. They led him to a cross in the countryside around the village of Pithiviers,
near Orleans. Macret gave his grimoire to Guillery, and following its instructions
they spread out a napkin at the foot of the cross. Then, sixty steps from it they
drew a circle on the ground in which Fortier was ordered to stand until told
otherwise. Guillery placed Fortier's money on the napkin, got down on one knee
in supplication, and said 'I greet you, my master.' On saying this, a hen appeared
on the napkin, but when Guillery repeated his salutation to the Devil it disap-
peared along with the money. Meanwhile one of the accomplices rolled around
on the ground pretending to be possessed. Guillery walked back to Fortier who
remained in the protective circle and informed him that the Devil had snatched
the money, and it would require more money to go through the ritual again to
procure the poule noire. Fortier complied, and after they all said a neuvaine
(reciting the same prayer nine days in a row) they went through the whole
charade once more. Several of the gang were sentenced to be pilloried, whipped,
branded, and banished. One was tied to the pillory post in the public square in
Pithiviers on three consecutive market days wearing a paper with the words
'Swindler by false magic'. 45

Enlightenment and Treasure | 107

Who else purchased the thousands of grimoires being produced? We cannot
assume that it was only the literate. The mere possession of non-diabolic grimoires
was thought by some to have a protective function. When, in 181 5, a vintner and
herbal healer named Pierre Belloc was arrested at a Bayonne inn for practising false
medicine, they found on him a copy of the Enchiridion Leonis papce. He said he had
bought it from a soldier 'who assured him that it would shield him from falling ill
and being killed'. 46 Those who could read we can divide into the merely curious
and the practitioners. Amongst the former during the mid-eighteenth century was
an adventurous, itinerant master glassier named Jacques-Louis Menetra. His copy
of the Petit Albert joined a modest list of books we know he also owned, namely
the Bible, a spiritual text, and two works by Rousseau. There is no indication in
Menetra's confessional journal that he dabbled in magic, and he was clearly
sceptical of the spirit world, so we can only assume that the rumours surrounding
the Petit Albert intrigued him. 47

As to the practitioners, we should not presume that they were all interested in
conjurations and spells, as most Bibliotheque bleue grimoires also contained simple,
pious healing charms and natural recipes. In one edition of the Grimoire du Pape
Honorius we find the following charm for ringworm, which, like numerous others
for minor ailments, is based on apocryphal biblical events:

Saint Peter, on the bridge of God, sat down; Our Lady of Caly came
there, and asked him: Peter, what are you doing there? Lady, it is for the
hurt of my master that I placed myself there. St Peter, you will remove it;
to Saint Ager you will go for it; you will take the holy ointment of the
mortal wounds of our Lord; you will grease them and you will say three
times: Jesus Mary. It is necessary to make the sign of the cross three times
over the head. 48

Charms such as these for staunching blood, toothache, snakebites, eye complaints,
and the like were normally only efficacious when employed by those thought to
possess a special gift for charming. So even though the Bibliotheque bleue grimoires
and the Medecin des pauvres, a popular nineteenth-century chapbook of healing
charms, were available to all for a few pennies, not everyone could use them. 49 As
French anthropologists, folklorists, and sociologists have shown, many charmers
did not practise other forms of magic and were devout churchgoers. Spirit
conjuration and making women dance naked were not for them. They were,
however, for the more unscrupulous cunning-folk.

In 1776 Francois Duthil, known familiarly as Minette, a former miller of
Cernoy, east of Beauvais, was tried for a series of frauds practised over a couple
of decades on the inhabitants of the villages and towns of Picardie. Much of his
professed power lay in his grimoires. These were small enough to be kept in his

108 | Enlightenment and Treasure

pocket, which suggests that they were members of the Bibliotheque bleue. One of
his victims, a young woman named Agnes de Larche, whom he made pregnant
and then abandoned, testified that he

always had two books with him, which he took great care to hide. He
read often from one of the two, and said to me, sometimes crying, 'this
book is the cause of our misfortune.' When we entered a town, he hid
one of them in his trousers, and gave the other one to me to hide; and
when we were ready for bed, he placed them under the mattress, saying
to me they were grimoires, and that, if they found them on him, they
would not honour him with hanging, but that he would be burned. 50

Whether Duthil's emotional outbursts were an act is impossible to say. If genuine,
then it may have been the case that Duthil had employed one of them, perhaps the
Grand grimoire, to make a pact with the Devil. He certainly played on his professed
familiarity with the Lord of Darkness. He told one of his victims, a labourer
named Toussaint Demont, whom, over a period of two years, he swindled out of
most of his money with repeated attempts to conjure hidden treasure, that the
Devil had written to him regarding its location. Agnes testified that when she
informed Duthil she was pregnant 'he told me only that the Devil was tormenting
him so that I would give up my child to him, and continually requested me to
consent to this sacrifice.' 51 This sounds like a wickedly cynical ruse to destroy the
troublesome illegitimate child. In August 1776 Duthil was branded and sent to the
galleys for life.

The folklore and trial records of the nineteenth century show how firmly
cemented the Bibliotheque bleue grimoires had become in the fabric of France's
tradition of popular magic. The reputations of cunning-folk depended on them.
During the trial in Agen of a wise woman named Rose Peres in 1 829, for instance, it
was heard how as part of her ritual for curing the child of a rich peasant she laid
down in front of him 'with a grave and mysterious air, the well-known book of
Petit Albert . Around the same time a couple of magicians defrauded an old woman
near Niort after impressing her with their copies of the Dragon rouge, Petit Albert,
and Grand grimoire. Later in the century a witness at the trial of a disreputable
sorcerer named Gaucher testified that he was afraid of him because 'he told me he
owned the Petit Albert and other books, which enabled him to do anything he
liked.' 52 The vast majority of those consulting cunning-folk in the early modern
period would have known nothing of the titles of the grimoires displayed to
impress them. The possession of books, particularly large ones, or manuscripts
with arcane symbols, was enough to convince that they were adepts in the
occult arts. The spread of literacy and popular literature meant that, by the
mid-nineteenth century, the Petit Albert, Grand Albert, and Dragon rouge were

Enlightenment and Treasure | 109

household names. To say one had the Petit Albert was shorthand for saying one was
deep in magic.

Feeling their spiritual authority challenged by the widespread influence of the
Bibliotheque bleue grimoires, the clergy launched a counter-offensive aimed at
demonizing them. They spread the message that those who possessed or even
desired such books, let alone used them, were committing a grave blasphemy.
Reading was a dangerous act. 53 A perusal of the folklore collections of the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries suggests the clergy met with considerable
success. In 1884, for instance, a letter in The Times recalled a conversation with a
woman in Tours: 'She spoke of the "Petit Albert" with the utmost horror, and told
me that the priests said that merely to look into it was a great sin, and that the devil
had the power to seize any one while in the act of reading it.' 34 A study of witchcraft
beliefs in twentieth-century Languedoc found that such statements were made
repeatedly by those interviewed. When asked about the Petit Albert, one person
said, 'It is forbidden to talk about it, the Church has forbidden it. It is a dangerous
book.' When another told his grandmother, 'I am going to buy the Petit Albert,'
she replied, 'You are mad! It is forbidden by religion ... It will make you ill.' 55

The influence of the Bibliotheque bleue grimoires stretched far beyond the
French border. France's southern neighbours tried to stem the tide. The Petit
Albert was added to the Spanish Index of Prohibited Books in 1782, and twenty-two
years later the 1800 edition of the Grimoire du pape Honorius was also included. 56
But the Index was a fairly redundant tool of censorship by now. In 1820 a Florence
bookseller was openly offering French editions of the Petit Albert and Grand Albert,
despite their presence on the Index, as well as recent editions of Le Grand grimoire
and Le Dragon rouge. 51 In the absence of similar chapbook grimoires in Italy,
publishers there turned to the French genre, and in 1868 the Dragon rouge was
translated into Italian as II Vero drago rosso. By this time it had already permeated
German magic under the title Der wahrhaftige, feurige Drache (The true, fiery Dragon).
To the north, French grimoires became engrained in the magical traditions of the
British Channel Islands and parts of the Low Countries. In 1854 it was estimated
that in the Ardennes region alone as many as 400,000 chapbook grimoires were in
circulation — surely an exaggeration, but nevertheless indicative of how much
they had infused into the popular consciousness. 58

Satan's Alpine seat

France may have been the centre of European grimoire printing, but for many
southern European Catholics during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
Geneva was the capital of diabolic magic, joining Salamanca and Toledo in the

110 I Enlightenment and Treasure

geography of occult learning. As trial records show, people travelled to Geneva
from across France, Spain, and Italy in search of magic books and familiar spirits.
The city was a major centre of publishing, but its occult reputation was due
primarily to it being a centre of Protestantism, the heartland of Calvinism. From
a Catholic point of view it was consequently portrayed as a wellspring of diabolic
heresy, a place where the Devil reigned amongst his Protestant disciples. For Italians
it was the nearest influential state free from the reach of the Catholic Church.

In 1744 one Nicolas Lambert played what he called a 'good trick' on some
visiting Italians seeking magical help. They had asked him whether they could
find the Petit Albert in Geneva, which, they explained, 'was a very useful book for
obtaining riches'. Lambert told them that the Petit Albert was a paltry item
compared to the power granted to those who possessed a familiar spirit that he
could procure for them. One of his dupes was Bartholomeo Bernardi from Lucca
in Tuscany. He had inquired of Lambert, 'if in this country there weren't people
who were given to magic, that is to say finding spirits, as in Italy'. More to the
point, he wondered 'if there weren't in this town books which were forbidden by
the Holy Office, and through which one could obtain great advantages'. Lambert
intimated that they had, indeed, come to the right place. Rather than purchase a
copy of the Petit Albert, Lambert convinced him to buy a box containing what he
said was a spirit, as well as an invocation in Italian to control it. Bernardi soon
realized he had been defrauded and despite the risk went to the authorities. The
Italians were ordered to leave the city and Lambert was banished for life.

One of those making a living from selling grimoires in the famed market in the
Place du Molard was Louise Chartier, wife of a printer named Odet Jacques. In
1 71 6 the authorities confiscated two manuscripts entitled, 'Sanctum Regnum seu
Pneumatologia Salomonis, with some other loose leaves from the same book, which
explain the nature of the Devil, his figure, his different names, his power, the
number of his officers'. Chartier confessed that she had paid a Savoyard to make
copies. Several decades later, copies of the Clavicula Salomonis were being pro-
duced by a group of conspirators made up of an innkeeper named Charles
Empeyta, a bookseller Pierre Lombard, a school master Jacques Dueros, and
Jacques Minot, an artist. Judging from the experience of a young man who was
staying at Empeyta's hotel with his aunt, the innkeeper acted as the inveigling
agent for Lombard. Empeyta persuaded the young man that Lombard possessed a
manuscript that would make his fortune. For the price of two gold Louis, and a
commission for Empeyta's service on top, he received his Clavicule, which con-
sisted of eighty-eight pages written in red and black ink by Ducros, who had
copied it from an 'original' he had previously sold. At the end of the manuscript
was a picture of the Devil in red crayon drawn by Minot. The outfit had also sold
copies of the same to people from Italy, Lyon, and Languedoc. 60

Enlightenment and Treasure | ill

By this time the Grand grimoire had joined the Petit Albert as a publishing
sensation. In the 1770s we find the 64-year-old printer and straw merchant
Moyse Morie offering copies of the Grand grimoire for extortionate sums. Refer-
ences in the trial records regarding its blue paper cover confirm its identity as a
member of the Bibliotheque bleue. Morie, who had long had a reputation in the
region for selling books of sorcery, offered a copy to a marcasite crystal merchant
named Vincent Carret for the huge sum of 300 livres. After negotiation he
accepted the still substantial payment of 16 livres, 11 gold sequins, some silver,
and an IOU for 5 gold Louis to be cashed six months hence. The reason for paying
such a large sum was the promise of treasure of course. Morie assured him that his
fortune would be made once he made a pact with a spirit. Carret soon regretted
his decision after a friend opened the book and declared that it contained nothing
more than a lot of 'twaddle'. 61

Delving further into the court records reveals that the authorities were keen to
find out where the Grand grimoire sold by Morie had been printed. A bookseller
was called to give testimony on the subject. 'Having examined the print and
characters of the said book,' he concluded, 'I have found nothing which makes me
believe that this book might have been printed in Geneva, and I think I can state
to the contrary, that it is impossible to determine in what place the said book was
printed.' 62 Fortunately Carret's copy was kept by the authorities and survives
today in the dossier on the case. An inspection confirms that, although bearing the
bogus date of 1603, it was a copy of the French edition published around 1750. It
had also been used, presumably by Carret, to make a pact with the Devil. On one
blank page a crude image of the Devil has been drawn in red ink or blood with the
command that the book seal a deal with the prince and emperor Lucifer. A similar
pact appears at the end, next to the image and character of Lucifuge Rofocale.

The second coming of St Cyprian

One of those who made his way to Geneva and found himself in court for his
troubles was a Spaniard named Moyse-Joseph Agilar, a failed priest and healer
from Segorbe, Valencia. 63 His energies were mostly directed at trying to find
hoards of gold ingots and pistoles hidden in the Spanish mountains. He teamed up
with two French treasure seekers, a leather worker named Jean de la Guarrigue
from Quercy and Antoine Riccard from near Toulouse. According to the two
Frenchmen, Agilar had convinced them of their quest by relating how a Jesuit
priest had informed him that in Geneva he could find books of magic and the
'characters' of the 'Prince of Devils', which would drive away the minor
demons that guarded treasures. The three men arrived in the capital of Calvinism

112 | Enlightenment and Treasure

via Lyon in 1672. Agilar set about searching first for a copy of the Virtutes Herbarum
by Albertus Magnus, in other words the Grand Albert, from which he wanted to
learn the magical properties of herbs and stones. Then they tried to obtain from a
shopkeeper books that would call up the Devil to aid them in their treasure quest.
Shortly after, someone informed on them and they were arrested. They claimed at
first that their travels were nothing more than a simple desire 'to see the world and
foreign countries'. Over a century later another Spanish priest, Juan Soler, was
directly involved in similar treasure endeavours that led to Geneva. Soler boasted
to his treasure-seeking companions that he had procured, on the advice of the
Devil, a book of conjurations from Geneva. He said he had bought it during a
record-breaking 48-hour round trip from the Catalonian town of Girona. The
same treasure-hunting group subsequently turned to a Frenchman to lead them. 64

As we have seen, until its disbandment in 1820, the Spanish Inquisition
expended much effort rooting out grimoires, and numerous copies were confis-
cated during the two hundred or so cases of treasure seeking the Inquisition
investigated between 1700 and 1820. 65 The Spanish Index listed the addition, in
1817, of a manuscript called the 'Book of conjurations for obtaining treasures'. It
joined another manuscript described as containing 'rules, conjurations and exor-
cisms to discover and to extract occult treasures'. 66 It is understandable that Agilar
felt it safer to take the arduous journey north rather than try and obtain one at
home. Across the border in Portugal the secular authorities were also active in
censoring publishers, with new regulations being instituted in 1768 to ban books
that promoted 'superstition'. 67 Yet, despite the attentions of Church and state,
grimoires continued to circulate throughout the Iberian Peninsula. A major
reason for this was the porous boundary between France and Spain, in particular
the Basque region straddling the western Pyrenees. In 1785 an Inquisitor ordered
that the sentence against a 'superstitious' treasure seeker be read in the church of
Mercadal, east of Santander, to warn people of the iniquity of the offence, which
he thought was more rife in the Bishopric than elsewhere 'because of the close
proximity with France'. 68 The French influence permeated to further parts of the
country. The Zaragoza tribunal dealt with a healer who said she learnt her
knowledge from the book of a French doctor. It also heard another case in
which the defendant related that a Frenchwoman had told him that treasure
could be found by releasing a black hen at the spot were the treasure was hidden
and then offering it to the Devil. Frenchmen were also implicated in several cases
of treasure hunting heard by the Inquisition during the century. 69

In the eighteenth century Bayonne in particular had a reputation amongst
Spaniards as a centre of magical practice second only to Geneva. This was in part
because it was the nearest large French town to the western Spanish border, and
therefore the most likely place to be able to obtain the Petit Albert and Grand

Enlightenment and Treasure | 113

grimoire. It was also due to the town having a well-known marranos and Jewish
population. Marranos were Spanish and Portuguese converted Jews ('New
Christians') who fled the attentions of the Spanish Inquisition and who were,
following a French royal edict of 1555, allowed to settle in the territory of
the Bordeaux Parliament, which stretched to the Spanish border. By the early
eighteenth century the Jewish faith was being openly practised in the town,
predominantly by new arrivals, despite the heavy restrictions on them instituted
by the Bayonne authorities. Meanwhile back in Spain the Inquisition launched
another major wave of suppression against converted Jews during the 1720s,
leading to further movements of marranos across the border. 70 A case heard by
the Zaragoza tribunal demonstrates the attraction of Bayonne for Spanish seekers
of magical knowledge. In 1740 a shoemaker named Andres Jaso visited the town
and consulted a Jewish magician in order to learn how to conjure up familiars or
demons that would aid his personal enrichment. He naturally returned disap-
pointed, and subsequently went to Geneva on the same quest. 71

By the mid-eighteenth century the Petit Albert was already influential amongst
cunning-folk in southwestern France. In 1742 a copy was confiscated along with a
book of exorcisms and various medical texts from a 'so-called surgeon' named
Jean Labadie, and a copy was found on a 'pretended' Bearnaise magician in
1783. 72 When, in the 1760s, the authorities of Dax arrested the magician and
itinerant house painter Dominique Lalanne they found a manuscript of Les
veritables clavkules de Salomon. He was also accused of having obtained a copy of
Del Rio's Disquisitionum Magicarum. The authorities, ignorant of the nature of the
book, evidently thought it suspicious. 7 ' But it would seem that the usual gri-
moires had a rival in the region — the Agrippa Noir or Black Agrippa. In his
unpublished memoirs, written in 1744, Mathieu du Bourg Caunegre, a townsman
of Magescq, referred to an 'Agrippa le Noir with all the figures', when discussing
with a friend what he should consult to make a spirit appear. 74 The Pyrenean
geographer Francois Flamichon, writing during the 1780s, related a legend of
Moorish treasure hidden in a cave near the village of Esquiule. Villagers had failed
to find it and so called in a Jewish conjurer from Saint-Esprit, a Jewish suburb of
Bayonne, who said he could get his hands on an 'Agrippa le Noir. He charged
them a considerable sum for his services and absconded with their hard-earned
money, leaving his dupes to wait in vain for his return. 75 We know such a
grimoire really existed in the region for we find a copy of Agrippa le Noir among
the books and manuscripts confiscated from Dominique Lalanne. From the
prosecution of an itinerant magician and doctor named Gracien Detcheverry
we also know that it circulated beyond the French-speaking community.

Born in the Basque region around 1700 Gracien Detcheverry, unlike most of
his kind, was a formally trained and licensed surgeon. 76 He plied his trade and

114 I Enlightenment and Treasure

mixed in dubious company both sides of the Pyrenees. It was during a visit to the
home of a Spaniard in the town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz in 1733 that he caught sight
of a manuscript in Spanish entitled 'Agripa Negra'. He bought it for the consid-
erable sum of seventy-five livres, and with it his career as a conjurer began in
earnest. Armed with his grimoire he professed to be able to find treasure and open
the doors of prisons, amongst other magical feats. He was arrested in Bayonne for
his nefarious activities and found guilty. Detcheverry's 'Agripa Negra' was burned
publicly in the Place Notre-Dame, and he was sentenced to the galleys for the rest
of his life. The court, however, ordered that a translation of the grimoire be made
so that they could better judge its contents, and this copy survives in the archives.
It is nineteen pages long and is primarily dedicated to treasure hunting. It consists
of a compilation of conjurations and receipts from several grimoires. More to the
point it is not a straight copy of anything in print at the time. Several of its
conjurations, such as one for the 'Rois d'Orient', are clearly from the Grimoire du
Pape Honorius, as is a conjuration for the spirit 'Nembrot'. 77 This does not mean
that all Agrippa le Noirs were the same or similar to Detcheverry's, but it represents
a distinct regional tradition that crossed linguistic and political frontiers.

Further south in Spain the old Moorish influence lingered, with Arabic magic
texts being much sought after. In 1730 the Inquisition tried an old illiterate man
from Carlet, near Valencia, who owned a book in Arabic that instructed that two
slaves had to be present when searching for treasure. These he bought and then
brought to the treasure site where he sacrificed a kid goat. When nothing
happened he cut the arms of one of the slaves so that they bled on the spot. In
Majorca several decades later a treasure hunter was found with a little book
written in Moorish language that contained magical 'triangles'. 78

During the nineteenth century a new and influential addition to the canon of
popular grimoires was born — the Libro de San Cipriano (The Book of St Ciprian).
The usual bogus claims were made as to its authorship. Some editions claimed that
a German monk named Jonas Sufurino, the librarian of the monastery of Broo-
ken, discovered or wrote it in the year 1000. Popular legend had it that the
original manuscript was safely locked away in the university or cathedral library in
the Galician capital Santiago. 79 Although modern editions claimed an initial
publication date of 15 10, there is, in fact, no mention in Spanish sources of a
grimoire with such a title until 1802, when the Inquisition prosecuted a priest for
possessing a manuscript called the Libro de San Cipriano, which he used to find
buried treasure. ' The papal Index, however, had long included 'prayers ascribed
to S. Cipriano' against evil spirits, incantations, witchcraft, and any other adver-
sity. 81 Significantly their use was evidently widespread in southwestern France
during the eighteenth century. In 1753 the Bishop of Oloron warned against the
'pretended exorcisms of Saint Cyprien that are to be found in the hands of some in

Enlightenment and Treasure | 115

our diocese'. It consisted of a prayer to Christ in which, amongst other things, he
is beseeched to protect people from the 'evil eyes of demons and from their
hearing, from deceiving tongues, from thunder, from lightening, from storms,
from all sort of enemies and evil spirits'. 82 It is easy to imagine that, at the time,
Cyprian's name might be added to a manuscript version of the Grand grimoire or
Grimoire du Pape Honorius. In fact extracts from a manuscript Libro de San Cipriano
published by a Galician historian in 1885 contain a Spanish version of the Grand
grimoire's instructions for addressing Lucifuge Rofocale. 83

In a French trial of 184 1 we find an intriguing reference to a book printed in
French and Latin entitled Cyprien Mago ante Conversionem. Its spurious place and
date of publication was 'Salamanca 1460'. It contained various 'magic, cabbalist and
diabolical' images, and instructions on how to obtain a treasure of eighteen million
with the help of the Devil. It was owned by a gunsmith, Jean Grange, from near
Toulouse, who inherited it from his father. Seduced by the prospect of huge wealth
Grange consulted a local sorcerer, named Lagrange, on how best to use the book,
and was advised that to proceed it would be first necessary to procure the Devil's
signature. Grange was hooked and the sorcerer orchestrated an elaborate hoax
conjuration of the Devil which involved an accomplice dressed in red trousers and
a black lambskin helmet in imitation of his satanic highness. Despite being in a foul
mood the Devil signed a piece of parchment and received a fee before exiting. 84

I have not been able to trace any surviving copies of the Cyprien Mago ante
Conversionem. It was almost certainly a local Bibliotheque bleue publication, and
confirms that a Cyprian treasure grimoire had been printed and circulated in
southwest France before it had in Spain. Yet it is quite possible that the Cyprien
Mago was an example of the flow of magical culture from Spain to France with a
French printer being inspired by a manuscript Libro de San Cipriano.

The publication of Spanish books with the title Libro de San Cipriano only
began in the late nineteenth century. 85 Two distinct genres emerged. 86 One
version of the Libro de San Cipriano was essentially a translation of the French
Grand grimoire. A Spanish edition of the latter, the Gran Grimoirio, had apparently
appeared in 1820, and this may have led to a further proliferation of manuscript
versions under the Cipriano name. In the 1840s, furthermore, one Spanish
bookseller, and no doubt others, was also selling the Nimes edition of the Dragon
rouge, copies of which may have also been transcribed and circulated under the
Cipriano name. 7 The second genre of the Libro de San Cipriano was a distinctively
Spanish creation rather than a comprehensive borrowing from the French trad-
ition. It was not concerned with diabolic invocations but rather contained
exorcisms and prayers for dispelling demons, healing the sick, finding lost
items, and providing protection against the evil eye. Some editions of the book
even advised that it was intended to help the clergy in aiding their parishioners.

Il6 | Enlightenment and Treasure

What undoubtedly most attracted readers, though, were the instructions on how
to obtain hidden treasures without recourse to the Devil. This could be achieved by
drawing a magical circle at the spot, entering, and praying to God, the saints, and
the angels, while reciting sacred names. The key to the success of this Libro de San
Cipriano was that it also provided a detailed list of the places in Galicia where
treasure could be found.

Why Galicia? The popularity and knowledge of the Libro de San Cipriano was
particularly strong in the province, and in neighbouring Asturias, where it was
popularly known as the Ciprianillo. Its cultural influence is evident from its
presence in the literary canon of the region. The Galician poet Manuel Curros
Enriquez (185 1— 1908) wrote a poem entitled O Ciprianillo, while in one of the
novels of his compatriot, the dramatist and novelist Ramon del Valle-Inclan
(1866— 1936), there is a passage in which an old man tries to find some treasure
by reading from a magic book entitled the Libro de San Cidrian (an obvious
reference to the Cypriano) by candlelight after sunset. 88 The region is rich in
prehistoric monuments, Neolithic and Bronze Age dolmens, burial mounds, and
Iron Age castros (hill forts). Galicia was also a major centre of prehistoric mining
with its tin and gold highly prized by the Roman conquerors, and continued to be
so into the early modern period. Consequently the area accrued a reputation for
ancient buried treasures. 89 It was not ancient peoples, however, that came to be
associated with this landscape of treasure but the Moors who had been driven out
of Galicia during the eighth century ad. Numerous legends evolved of Moorish
gold hidden in the castros, many protected by spells and spirits that only the
Ciprianillo could break. In the early 1930s the Galician writer Vicente Risco
collected various oral accounts of the successful conjurations of such Moorish
treasure involving the Ciprianillo. One legend told how a man consulted his
Ciprianillo, drew a Solomonic circle on the ground, and thereby hauled out all
the bad spirits, 'souls in sorrow', which guarded the treasure. All night long he and
his lucky assistants removed bars of gold and silver from the site. In another
instance a group read from the Ciprianillo for two hours and then the ground
began to shake, thunder shook the sky, and a series of devils emerged from a hole
in the ground dragging carts full of gold. 90

It would seem that from the seventeenth century onwards printed and
manuscript gacetas (gazetteers) listing the locations of such buried treasures were
popular in parts of Spain. 91 In 1739, for instance, a priest of Albacete confessed
that he had been guilty of treasure hunting after a soldier based in Granada had
'shown him a book in Arabic . . . which indicated several places and spots where
the Moors had buried precious objects and treasures'/ 2 The gacetas seem to have
been particularly influential in the old Moorish kingdom of Granada and in
the northwestern provinces. Writing in 1750 the Benedictine monk Benito

Enlightenment and Treasure | 117

Jeronimo Feijoo (1676-1764), an arch-critic of popular 'superstition', noted from
his own experience that treasure seeking for Moorish gold was rife in Galicia and
Asturias. During his childhood in the region he heard stories of prized manu-
scripts that revealed the location of treasures. Some believed that such tomes did
not exist and were merely the products of peasant tales, but Feijoo was persuaded
of their reality when one of them was given to him in which directions were
provided for locating twenty treasures hidden in the countryside around the city
of Oviedo. 9 " People puzzled over where these gacetas came from. Some believed
that such knowledge of Moorish treasure originated from those who had been
held captive and ransomed by Barbary pirates in Algiers and Morocco — a
profitable line of trade right into the nineteenth century. Others thought such
secret knowledge must have derived from documents in the famed Royal
Archive of Simancas. 54

The influence of these gacetas certainly remained strong in Asturias and Galicia
throughout the nineteenth century, where old manuscript and printed versions
continued to circulate. Around 1 8 50 an enterprising Galician publisher produced a
cheap, poorly printed hoax gaceta entitled the Millonario de San Ciprian, which
purported to contain a list of the hidden Roman and Moorish treasures secreted in
the neighbourhood of the city of Coruna. It had the bogus imprint of 'Amsterdam',
mimicking the ruse used by Spanish publishers wishing to avoid the censorious
attentions of the Inquisition, and the date 1521. Its purported author was Adolfo
Ojarak. The surname spelt backwards is the rude Spanish exclamation 'Carajo!',
and the author used the same technique to turn derogatory coarse phrases addressed
to its readers into supposed secret words of power. 95

For Feijoo the worst thing about the 'vain and pernicious' preoccupation with
gacetas was that it seduced people into resorting to magic. This was brought home
to him by perusing a grimoire owned by the same person who gave him the gaceta.
The man handed both over to Feijoo after becoming disillusioned with his lack of
success and fearful over their sinful, 'superstitious' influence. 96 During the early
twentieth century one Asturian folklorist recorded an account of a man from the
hamlet of Vildas, who, frustrated in his attempt to dig up treasures mentioned in a
gaceta, resorted to the Libro de San Cipriano to invoke a demon to aid him. 97 It is no
surprise, then, that in the late nineteenth century an enterprising publisher hit
upon the idea of packaging a gaceta for Galicia with the Libro de San Cipriano,
thereby providing both the location of buried treasures and the magical means of
capturing them. Some editions also published a list of treasures in Portugal,
ensuring the spread of the Cipriano 's influence on local traditions, particularly in
the Barroso region of northern Portugal, with its strong cultural and linguistic ties
with Galicia. )H As we shall see in a later chapter, it was not long before it was also
being sold far and wide across Latin America.

Il8 | Enlightenment and Treasure

The land of Faust

The late eighteenth century saw the beginnings of volkskunde — the study of the
life and culture of the 'people' and the precursor of what we know today as
'folklore'. In Germany this interest grew out of the Romantic movement, and
while it was not a specifically German phenomenon, the likes of the Grimm
brothers were hugely influential in inspiring others around Europe to explore the
stories and beliefs of the poor and uneducated. Conveniently forgetting that the
judiciary in some central European states had only recently rejected the crime of
witchcraft, the interest in what were now seen as the mental relics of an unen-
lightened medieval age took several forms. There were those learned men and
women across Europe who considered it necessary to identify and understand
'vulgar' beliefs and practices the better to stamp them out in the name of either
God or rationalism. Others were more compassionate, recognizing the aesthetic
and cultural worth in the mdrchen or tales of the peasantry, while acknowledging
that such survivals would succumb to the necessary forces of progress.

Grimoires, seen as the remnants of benighted medieval magic, did not con-
veniently fit into the romantic perception of folklore as oral culture. Yet their
continued influence on popular beliefs rendered them of interest to those whose
enthusiasm for volkskunde was matched by the natural curiosity of the biblio-
phile. 100 The most well known of these was the celebrated writer Johann Wolf-
gang von Goethe (1749— 1832), best known for his verse drama of the Faust
legend. He certainly had an interest in Western esotericism, paid serious attention
to the spiritualism of Swedenborg, and was fascinated though sceptical of the
occult exploits of Cagliostro. 101 There is no evidence that Goethe ever dabbled in
the magical arts, though, and so his enthusiasm for collecting grimoires was
probably born more of inquisitiveness and bibliomania than any practical interest
in their contents. He expressed a book collector's embarrassment over the money
he paid out for one grimoire that he had been tracking for a considerable time. It
was a handsome manuscript dating to around the middle of the eighteenth century
entitled Bibliae Magicae, and is noteworthy for being the earliest known German
grimoire professing to consist of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. Goethe also
owned a version of another distinctively German grimoire entitled Faust's
Hollenzwang {Faust's Infernal Command), which, like the Grand grimoire, concerned
the calling up of the Devil, and was much sought after by treasure seekers.

Different motives led the German philologist and librarian Johann Christoph
Adelung (1732— 1806) to include a copy of a Faust's Hollenzwang in his History of
Human Folly. 102 This was possibly the first printed version of the grimoire, though
disappointingly, as Adelung explained, it had to be stripped of the original
manuscript's magical signs and sigils in order to reduce the cost of publication.

Enlightenment and Treasure | 119

What remained were various prayers and adjurations for calling the angels and
spirits, which were included at the end of a volume that extensively trashed the
reputations of John Dee, Nostradamus, and Paracelsus. Adelung published it for
the same reasons that Reginald Scot published charms and conjurations — to
expose the folly of believing in them. Just as with Scot, it probably proved a
counter-productive exercise in the long run. At the end of the eighteenth century
by no means all bibliophiles were averse to the lure of the occult. A university-
educated town councillor in Darmstadt called Karl Wunderlich (1769— 1 841) used
his extensive collection for alchemical and magical purposes. Amongst the 1,700
volumes in his study were copies of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, the
Hollenzwang, and other books of conjuration attributed to Dr Faust.

The attribution of many of the eighteenth-century grimoires to Faust is
perfectly understandable considering the huge popularity of chapbook accounts
of his life. The town most associated with him, Wittenberg, had also long had a
reputation as a centre of magic. When Fynnes Moryson visited the town in 1591
he noted that 'they shew a house wherein Doctor Faustus a famous conjurer
dwelt . . . and had a tree all blasted and burnt in the adjoining, where hee practised
his Magick Art.' 103 Some early Lutheran Reformers expressed their chagrin that
the popular association of Faust with the town overshadowed its place as the heart
of Lutheranism. The town's reputation continued into the nineteenth century.
According to one legend recorded in the town of Chemnitz, Saxony, in the
1840s, the original Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses were kept at Wittenberg. 104

The Faust grimoires by no means completely dominated eighteenth-century
literary magic. As well as Moses, of course, there were other prominent authors
such as a Renaissance mage named Dr Habermann and another named Rabbi
Rabellina. Both were bogus it would seem. The secretary of the Dresden Royal
Library, and later its chief, Friedrich Adolf Ebert, recalled that in 18 17 he and his
colleagues received numerous urgent requests for a work by Rabellina called Die
goldne Tabella Rabellina, which was described by inquirers as containing an image
of a raven with a ring in its beak and various occult characters. The image of a
raven, it should be noted, was a common element in German grimoires, and one
genre of grimoire was entitled The Black Raven. Ebert's curiosity was provoked
and he searched in vain for a copy amongst the library's books and manuscripts;
neither could he find any clues to the identity of Rabellina. His interest waned but
was roused again when one of the inquirers subsequently wrote to say that he had
found a copy owned by a Dresden resident and offered to show it to Ebert. Ebert
later published a description of it for the benefit of his 'brother librarians, who may
have been wearied with similar inquiries'. It was a printed edition, published
sometime after 1750, consisting of forty-eight badly written and poorly produced
pages. It was entitled Trinum perfectum magice alba; et nigra;, and professed to consist

120 | Enlightenment and Treasure

of magical wisdom from the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. It contained many
characters and seals, which had been produced by hand rather than woodcut.
Ebert considered it to be 'from beginning to end the merest nonsense'. 105

The Trinum perfection provided instructions on how to command spirits, and
one suspects that some of those writing to the Dresden Library had treasure on
their minds. It was, after all, this activity that fuelled the production of the
manuscripts collected by the likes of Goethe and Wunderlich. Until the middle
of the century treasure seeking remained a capital crime in some German Catholic
states, and a mandate against it was issued in the Prince-Bishopric of Bamberg as
late as 1776. Prosecutions occurred periodically throughout the century, and
numerous grimoires were confiscated in the process. 106 In 1773, in the south-
western town of Giinzburg, for instance, the ringleader of a group of treasure
seekers was punished by having to kneel in the marketplace with his magical
manuscripts. 107 Among them was the much sought after St Christopher Prayer for
compelling the spirits and demons that guarded treasure. In southern Germany
during the mid-eighteenth century Protestant and Catholic theologians alike
condemned its use. 108 It consisted of a long-winded plea to the saint, which, in
some versions, beseeched him to send a spirit in human form with 99,000 ducats
of currency. It was described by the English scholar of German magical literature,
Eliza Butler, as 'an interminable, hysterical and maddeningly repetitive series of
prayers and conjurations which could I think only have emanated from a German
brain'. 109 (Needless to say, Butler, a Cambridge professor of German, had a deeply
prejudiced view of German culture. A few years after the Second World War she
wrote several books on the history of magic, which were underpinned by her
belief that in Germany's literary and magical traditions she could identify traces of
the psyche that bred Nazism.)

By the end of the eighteenth century treasure hunting was creating a consid-
erable market for German grimoires not only in the German states but also in
Austria and parts of neighbouring Switzerland. In a series of trials in the Vorarlberg,
the westernmost Alpine state in Austria, we find would-be treasure seekers going
to considerable effort and expense to find copies. 0 Amongst the most prized
in this part of the Catholic Alps were grimoires attributed to the Jesuits, such as
one handed over to the Austrian Church authorities in 1823 entitled Der wahrhafte
Jesuiten allerhochste Hollenzwang (The Truthful Jesuit's Very Highest Infernal
Command). 111 The Jesuits were expelled from Austria in 1773 following a papal
decree, and it is likely that the concept of the Jesuit grimoire, containing the
hidden knowledge of a forbidden society, developed there afterwards. Another
distinctive grimoire tradition in this part of the Alps concerned a magical prayer
book said to have been written by the thirteenth-century mystic and prophetess
St Gertrude of Helfta. The prayers in the Gertrudenbuchlein, like those of St Cyprian

Enlightenment and Treasure | 121

and St Christopher elsewhere, were thought to be hugely useful in dealing with
the spirits and devils that guarded treasure. Pious Gertrude prayer books had been
circulating in the German language during the seventeenth century, but it was
probably only in the following century that her association with treasure hunting
developed in Alpine folklore. 112

The extent to which grimoires circulated in popular as well as learned culture is
indicated by the case of the itinerant glass-painter Joseph Reuther. During the
1 770s he was hired to seek out magic manuscripts on his travels through the towns
and villages of Bavaria. As Reuther could not read Latin, the language in which
parts of some of the grimoires were written, he went into partnership with a
weaver named Christopher Reger, of Lauingen, who could. Reger made German
translations to sell on, though he admitted that he could not understand every-
thing he read in the manuscripts gathered by Reuther and so omitted such passages
in the copies he made. 113 One of their treasure-seeking acquaintances, a tailor,
owned a magical manuscript in Latin that he passed on to his landlady, who then
applied to Reger.

Around 1775 someone, somewhere, printed a 32-page German work entitled
D. Fausts Original Geister Commando, apparently written by Dr Habermann, and
dated Rome 15 10. Professing to be based on a Solomonic tract, the Sixth and
Seventh Books of Moses, and Tabella Rabellina, it contained a depiction of a raven
perched on a book, magical sigils, and lists of the secret holy names of God and the
spirits, including Mephistopheles. This very rare book, now in the British Library,
was poorly printed, suggesting it might have been an early attempt at reaching a
popular market. It was evidently one of several printed versions judging from
Ebert's account of the similar Rabellina Trinum perfectum. Other volksbucher con-
taining magical receipts, though not spirit conjurations, proved far more successful
around the time. One was a chapbook entitled Die Egyptische Geheimnisse
(Egyptian Secrets), which was attributed to Albertus Magnus. It contained what
were purported to be gypsy (i.e. Egyptian) charms like those contained in French
grimoires and the Medecin des pauvres, for a range of human and livestock ailments,
as well as other simple household spells to protect against thieves, evil spirits, and
wicked people. Even more popular was a similar compilation of 'gypsy' magic
called the Romanusbuchlein, the first known edition of which appeared in Silesia in
1788, though Venice was given as the place of publication. 114

The influence of the Bibliotheque bleue grimoires beyond the French border has
already been noted. As national boundaries changed during the upheaval of the
Napoleonic wars, so concerns over the circulation of illicit French publications
fluctuated. The Prussian authorities in the Rhineland territories annexed in 18 15,
for instance, were very wary of French political and religious influence, and
consequently kept a close eye on the flow of books. When, in 1834, a peddler

122 | Enlightenment and Treasure

-

I

3-

* MAGUS INS1GNIS .
Orioinau hoc ores magicum romam ad

AliXANORUM VI A I). IIABLRMANNO TRANS!

^ '0

TS

D.FALSTS

( ORIGINAL )
GEISTER COMMANDO

PER

( HOLLEN )

UND AI.I.ER. ANDER GEISTER

( Z WAN G )

SOWOHL DIE BfiSEN.AI.S GlfTEN

CSP1RJTUS )

DES GANTZEN GEISTER RIUCHES

CFAMILIARIUM )

U ALIEN 1)11

Fig. 8 D. Faust's original geister commando (c.1775) — frontispiece and title page.

from near Trier applied for a passport to go to Lyon, officials expressed concern
that he might bring back pernicious publications. 115 They may not have been
thinking of grimoires but Lyon certainly had a reputation in German states as a
centre of occult publishing second only to Rome. This was in part due to the
legendary Beringos Fratres. Some of the German Faust grimoires circulating in the
eighteenth century stated they were copied from works published in Lyon, such as
one held in Dresden Library entitled D. Johannis Fausti Magia cekberrima, dated
151 1, and another entitled Doct.Joh. Fausten's Miracul, Kunst und Wunderbuch. 116
At the time, the Prussian authorities also had a burgeoning German market to
police. In 1824 an edition of Albertus Magnus's Egyptian Secrets was confiscated
from one trader. 117 By 1850 a fourth German edition of the Dragon rouge had
apparently been published in Ilmenau in the centre of Germany. 118 Ironically, the
biggest boost to the democratization of German grimoires did not come from
abroad or from illicit publishers, though, but from scholarly exercises in historical
inquiry.

Between 1821 and 1826 the Protestant pastor Georg Conrad Horst (1769—
1832) produced a six-volume compilation of magical works printed by the Mainz
publisher Florian Kupferberg. Considering the long history of Protestant clerical
condemnation of grimoires, it is somewhat surprising that a pastor would be
responsible for the first major grimoire publishing exercise since the seventeenth
century. Horst certainly had an abiding interest in the history of witchcraft and
magic, and in 1818 had written a widely read encyclopaedic history of the subject,

Enlightenment and Treasure | 123

Daemonomagie oder Geschichte des Glaubens und Zauberei. Horst, who unlike some of
his brethren, looked detachedly upon witchcraft as a historical phenomenon, was
one of the first witchcraft historians to delve into the archives and it was presum-
ably his research in this area that led him to seek out 'medieval' magic manuals that
represented the mindset of the age. But the most far-reaching influence on the
spread of German grimoires was the publishing venture of the Stuttgart antiquar-
ian bookseller Johann Scheible. Very little is known about him despite consider-
able archival research. 119 He seems to have set up his first publishing house in 183 1
and over the next few years it went through various partnerships. There is nothing
to suggest he had any occult interests. A catalogue of 1836 contains no magic
works. So it remains a complete mystery as to why, between 1845 and 1849, he
included some forty grimoires in a twelve-volume collection of old 'miraculous
and curious' German literature, Das Kloster. 120 Unlike the Bibliotheque bleue, Das
Kloster was a purely antiquarian exercise and certainly not affordable for or
produced for a popular readership. Scheible went to considerable effort to gather
manuscripts from libraries and private owners of varying social levels and occult
interests. Amongst those manuscripts he included were a copy of the St Christo-
pher Prayer, several grimoires attributed to Habermann, Faust, and Solomon, and
Das Buck Jezira and Trinum Magiae by Rabellina. Of all the magic books that
Scheible put into print for the first time, the most influential was the Sixth and
Seventh Books of Moses. Some German scholars have pointed to an advert that
appeared in the literary periodical Allgemeiner Litterarischer Anzeiger in 1797 offer-
ing magic books for sale, including the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, as proof of
a late-eighteenth-century first edition. It would seem, however, that Scheible was
the first to print a full version. 121 This may seem a pedantic point, but it is a
significant detail considering that Scheible's edition would be copied by others
and go on to have a global cultural impact comparable to the Petit Albert.

Black books in the North

There is no doubting the effect that German manuscript grimoires had on the
magical tradition of its northern neighbours. The influence was strongest in Den-
mark where we find references to the 'Faustbog' and the 'Romolus-bog\ the latter
presumably a version of the Romanusbiichlein. 122 Legends circulated in Sweden and
Norway regarding those who possessed the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. 123 In
1802 the Danish authorities arrested an itinerant cunning-man and treasure hunter
named Jens Clemmensen and confiscated a magic book in German bearing the title
'Julius Ciprianus den XII & D.J. Faustus Dreyfaices Hollen Schwang'. The book
survives today in the Danish Royal Library. 1 4 Considering the close trading links

124 I Enlightenment and Treasure

between the Baltic neighbours it is no surprise that German grimoires circulated
freely enough in Scandinavia. Military relationships also provided another conduit.
Both the Danish and Swedish monarchs relied heavily on German mercenaries
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, Germans trained the
Danish Norwegian army during the eighteenth century, and German was the
language of military command there until the 1770s. As we shall see, though,
svarteboken or svartkonstboken, 'black books' or 'black work books', as grimoires are
known in Danish and Swedish, accrued their own distinctive traditions and content.

It has been estimated that over a hundred black books survive in Norwegian
libraries and museums alone, most dating to the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. 125 This figure is by no means representative of the number that must
have been produced, and so for Scandinavia as a whole it is not unlikely that
several thousand manuscripts circulated during the period. In the 1820s one poor
Danish cottager, an autodidact, made a living transcribing and selling upwards of a
hundred copies of one manuscript black book in his possession. 126 Despite sharing
the same name the content of the Scandinavian black books are surprisingly
diverse, a consequence perhaps of the limited print tradition during the eighteenth
century. Some were simple charm books and herbals rather than grimoires,
providing practical medical advice, some of it illicit. Several Norwegian black
books, for instance, contained herbal recipes to procure abortions using savin, a
non-native juniper. 127 Most included spells for the usual desires. Treasure hunting
was, of course, as popular as elsewhere in Europe. 128 Some black books also
provided instructions on how to make a pact with the Devil, such as the following
from an example dating to around 1790— 1820:

When you want to release the angels from Hell, you should in the
morning when you rise say this:

I renounce you, God the Father that has made me. I renounce you, the
Holy Spirit that has blessed me. I will never worship or serve you after this
day, and I completely swear to Lucifer, ruler of the dark abyss. And I
swear to his rule, and he shall serve me and do what I ask of him. In
exchange I will give you my own blood as insurance and a pledge. This
insures me to him with body and soul for all eternity, if he does what I
ask, order, or command of him. And thereupon I sign my own hand and
with my own blood. This to be certain and true in every possible way.' 129

The influence of such literature on young men was of particular concern to
Danish and Swedish authorities during the eighteenth century. A series of trials
were held in Denmark in the 1720s involving soldiers who had made such written
pacts with the Devil. Several of the men were publicly executed as a warning of
the heinousness of this ultimate act of blasphemy. Over the next decade or so

dxv;s

A G J A

Ht T' A A T 0 JV1

Fig. 9 Title page from a late eighteenth-century Latin Cyprianus entitled the 'key of hell or
white and black magic'.

126 I Enlightenment and Treasure

Danish theologians and jurists spilt much ink debating the religious and legal
position of pact making. Likewise in Sweden at least twenty-nine people were
tried for the same crime between 1680 and 1789. 130

In Denmark and Norway, the latter remaining a Danish territory during the
eighteenth century, many black books were attributed to the authorship of
St Cyprian, though by the nineteenth century there was confusion about his
identity. In Holsten, Denmark, Cyprianus was believed to be an evil Dane kicked
out of Hell, while a Norwegian black book described him as a 'tender and decent'
student. 131 Why the Lutheran Danes adopted him as their grimoire author
supreme is less obvious than his hold in Catholic Spain, where churches as well
as prayers were dedicated to the real rather than legendary saint. Germany was the
most likely influence. We fmd a grimoire entitled 'Cyprianus Hollenzwange'
circulating in Germany at the time, and Scheible printed a text entitled 'Cyprian's
Invocation of Angels, with his Conjuration for the Spirits guarding Hidden
Treasures'. Jens Clemmensen's treasure-conjuring manual was probably a
version of this manuscript. Whatever the path of influence, the pre-eminence of
the title in Danish magical tradition was certainly sealed by the publication in the
1770s of the first printed Scandinavian black book — more of which a little later.

Because there was no chapbook grimoire revolution in Scandinavia, ownership
during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was restricted largely to the
educated middling sort, namely civil servants, teachers, clergy, and soldiers. The
latter had a particularly strong influence on the circulation of grimoires in
Scandinavian society. One black book owner was a Norwegian military officer
and farmer named Ulrich Christian Heide (d. 1785). 133 He was in many ways a
typical 'enlightenment' man. He spoke several languages and donated some 457 of
his books in English, French, and Danish, including the writings of Voltaire, to a
military school. His svartebok was not among them. Was his interest in his black
books that of the detached antiquarian? Or did it contain occult secrets in which
Heide had an earnestly professional interest? One can understand why a finely
produced Cyprianus of Danish origin, written around the same time as Heide's
black book, was owned by a succession of Norwegian officers during the early
nineteenth century. 134 It contained magic to improve one's shot and to curry
favour with superiors.

As has already been mentioned, the other great attraction of black books for
soldiers was the information some of them contained regarding the Devil's pact.
Soldiers made up nearly a half of those prosecuted in eighteenth-century Sweden
for attempting to make a pact with Satan. As well as money they understandably
asked for protection from bullets and a guaranteed lifespan. Military interest was
further enhanced by the legendary diabolic activities of the French general the
Duke of Luxembourg, who, as we have seen, was caught up in the Affair of the

Store Swmmelmg

fatnt

Shttudittng til at faun.

0 ®

gotlagSfcog^anbelen, Singaarbfhcebe 18.

prts: } Xv. 50 Q)vc.

Fig. 10 Prophetesses and Cyprianus' Big Dream Book. A nineteenth-century Danish divination
manual.

128 I Enlightenment and Treasure

Poisons. The magician Lesage claimed Luxembourg had requested his magical aid
in military matters amongst other things, while Marie Bosse stated, under torture,
that Luxembourg desired to call up the Devil. Luxembourg was known to have a
weakness for fortune-tellers and admitted under interrogation to having consulted
Lesage on a couple of occasions. He said that Lesage had offered to sell him a copy
of the Enchiridion Leonis papce, but he declined. 133 There was no mention in the
police archives that he had ever attempted a Devil's pact.

Rumours of his occult dabblings were quickly used for propagandist purposes,
and in 1680 the first of numerous editions of a German chapbook appeared, which
gave an account of how the duke had sold himself to the Devil while in the Bastille
in 1659. 36 The myth was further promoted in a couple of English publications
following his successes against the English King William in Flanders during the
early 1690s. In one an English soldier reflects, 'the Devil and Luxemburg did
bewitch us: And that damn'd Magician may brag of this, as one of his bravest
Feats.' 137 More to the point, Danish editions of the German Luxembourg
chapbook also appeared during the second half of the eighteenth century. 138
There is no doubt that the story was influential in Scandinavia. An account of
Luxembourg's pact, presumably a German edition, was found amongst the pos-
sessions of a Swedish diabolist in 1776. His name also found its way into several
Norwegian black books. A treasure-digging spell from around 1800 mentions
'Doctor Factus' (Faustus) and 'Luxenborg' as the Devil's servants, and a black
book Devil's contract from around 1780 refers to 'Lukemborgs'. 139

Scandinavian manuscript grimoires were commonly given a foreign origin. We
have seen this was standard practice elsewhere, but in Scandinavia little reference
was made to such legendary centres of grimoire production as Rome, Salamanca,
Toledo, and Lyon. The owner of one svartebok, a Norwegian schoolteacher
named Arne Larsen, wrote in it that he had purchased it in Amsterdam on the
15 September 18 16 and paid three Dutch stivers for it, the equivalent of a few
pence at the time. Another example stated that it had been written by one Bishop
Johannes Sell 'from Oxford | in England | year 1682'. This is undoubtedly the
Bishop of Oxford John Fell (1625—86), who in 1681 had published a translation of
St Cyprian's Of the Unity of the Church} 40 It is obvious, then, why Fell was picked
on to be a black book author, but he was nevertheless an unusual choice. A couple
of manuscript versions of a Danish Cyprianus claimed to be copied from
one supposedly printed in Stavanger, Norway, in 1699. For Danes, Norway,
like Finland, had a reputation as a land of magicians due to legends surrounding
the Saami of the northern territories. 141

By far the most widespread belief was that the black books came from
Wittenberg, where folklore had it that the Scandinavian clergy trained in a school
for the black arts. Only once they had been awarded their black books could

Enlightenment and Treasure | 129

ministers return to their parishes and command and exorcize the Devil. According
to a Norwegian legend, though, some ministers left Wittenberg empty-handed, as
there were more students than available black books. 142 Numerous black books
adhered to this Wittenberg derivation, such as one manuscript entitled 'Cypria-
niugs Kunstboeg', which explained that it was found in the 'Vittenbergs Accade-
mie in 1722'. In another we find an inscription that it was 'a copy of the actual
Black book, written at the university of Wittenberg year 1529 and thereafter
found at Copenhagen Castle in the year 1591'. In both cases, and in others, we
also find the motif that the manuscript was found in a marble chest. 143 This
Wittenberg tradition was obviously influenced in part by the Faust legend. People
in Scandinavia certainly tried to emulate him. A Devil's pact written by a
shoemaker of Odense, Denmark, in 1634 began, 'I give myself to Satan to be
his own with body and soul. Just as Dr. Faustus became Satan's own, may I do the
same.' A Danish soldier named Johan Pistorius, prosecuted in 1718, said he was
inspired to make a pact with the Devil after reading a book on Doctor Faustus. 144
But in Lutheran Scandinavia the notion of ministers training at a School of Black
Arts in Wittenberg suggests a blending in popular tradition of the town's dual
reputation as both the home of Faust and the home of Martin Luther and the
Reformation. Indeed, a Danish Church Ordinance of 1627 requiring all
prospective Lutheran ministers to obtain a university degree meant that some
Norwegian clergymen did attend the University of Wittenberg, as well as that
in Copenhagen and the north German town of Rostock. 145

The advent of print grimoires did little to undermine the Wittenberg tradition.
The first one printed in Scandinavia, Sybrianus P. P. P., was produced in Denmark
in 1 77 1, around the same time as they were starting to be published in Germany. It
was penned by an impoverished writer named Soren Rosenlund, who, under the
nom de plume 'Junior Philopatreias' had written works on a variety of mundane
topics. We can assume that Rosenlund's decision to publish the Sybrianus was
motivated purely by money rather than an Enlightenment exercise in highlighting
the folly of grimoires. The content was made up of a mix of his own inventions
along with recipes and conjurations culled from manuscripts. It is likely that
he made use of those housed in the Danish Royal Library, and it is presumably
from these that he borrowed the various runic symbols that made the Sybrianus
P. P. P. distinctive. There is no doubting the significant impact the Sybrianus
P. P. P. had on the Danish manuscript tradition. Numerous handwritten black
books from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries share the same title, the
various runic formulae it contained, and the distinctive and curious descending
kalemaris charm, which worked in the same way as abracadabra, was commonly
employed: 146

/> r * '• * * y v —

y -

Side af Anders Ulfkj;ers Cyprianus.
Fig. II Page from the Danish cunning-man Anders UlfkjEer's Cyprianus.

Enlightenment and Treasure | 131

KALEMARIS
KALEMARI
KALEMAR
KALEMA
KALEM
KALE
KAL
KA
K

Around 1890 another enterprising Dane named Henrik Kokborg, an apoth-
ecary, photographer, and small-time book publisher on the Danish mainland
produced a cheap grimoire under the title En lille Udtog af Syprianus (A Little
Piece of Syprianus) . 147 As the use of the 'S' in Syprianus suggests, some of its
contents shared similarities with Rosenlund's production, but otherwise much
of it was probably garnered from several manuscript black books that Kokborg was
known to have possessed. Kokborg had a reputation for practising magic and
various legends tell how he bewitched people and called up the Devil. He
certainly knew that there was money to be made from such beliefs. As well as a
Celestial Letter, he published a couple of broadside charms to help the bewitched,
and his Syprianus contained more spells against witchcraft than Rosenlund's and
other manuscript black books. 48

It was only during the second half of the nineteenth century that similar cheap
grimoires were printed in Sweden. One of the first, published in Stockholm in
1877, was entitled Svartkonstboken, and had a stylized image of the Devil on the
front. It cost 25 ore, the price of a few postage stamps at the time. It began with an
account entitled 'How I got the Black Art Book', which ignores the black book
legends mentioned earlier. The narrator tells a story of how he became acquainted
with a strange old man with gypsy blood in his veins. He was a 'trollkarlen — a
'witch-man' or cunning-man who said he gained some of his powers from his
black book. He said that when he first read it sparks emanated from it, he was sick
for days afterwards and subsequently began to behave strangely. One dark and foul
night the narrator visited the strange man in his hut in the woods, hoping to get a
glimpse of his mysterious book. The cunning-man led him into a small room,
lifted up a log, and in a hole beneath lifted out an old, yellowing book, which he
gave to the narrator. It contained passages in Latin and so the narrator concluded
that the monks must have had some hand in its content. The narrator in present-
ing its magical contents to the reader said he reproduced it for the sake of curiosity
rather than as a valuable manual of magical aid.

132 I Enlightenment and Treasure

The importance of print is a surprising recurring motif in the Scandinavian
black book tradition. The act of transcription and the rituals associated with the
creation of magic manuscripts, the use of parchment and consecrated inks for
example, meant that, in general, print was seen as inherently less magical. It would
seem that in Scandinavia, though, print was a seal of authority and occult
legitimacy. We see this in the statements in several Cyprianus grimoires that
they were copies of one printed in Stavanger in 1699, and the claim in the
'Cyprianiugs Kunstboeg' that it derived from a copy found in 1722 and subse-
quently printed. A Danish cunning-man prosecuted during the mid-nineteenth
century made the point of telling the court that he had obtained his knowledge
from a 'Sympathie Book' 'published by Cyprianus and printed in red letters'. 4
In Finland, which had long been a Swedish territory until it was incorporated into
the Russian empire during the early nineteenth century, the tradition of 'Black
Bibles' used by tietajas (cunning-folk) was evidently shaped by Swedish print
culture. As recorded in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Finnish
folklore, the Black Bibles were thought to consist of white or red print on black
pages. One Finnish folklorist, commenting on the reputation of a tietajas named
Old Aapa who was known to possess a Black Bible, noted that some 'claimed that
while Aapa certainly had some kind of book, it was just an old Swedish medical
handbook'. 150 The Black Bible with its red print on black pages had clear diabolic
associations, which were in turn coloured by resentment regarding Swedish
cultural influence. A similar demonizing of ruling elites has been identified in
Estonian folklore regarding German landlords. 151

English reserve?

As elsewhere, there was a ready market for grimoires in Britain. Eighteenth- and
early-nineteenth-century cunning-folk treasured copies of Reginald Scot's Dis-
coverie and Robert Turner's edition of Agrippa's Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy.
Manuscript versions and extracts circulated in popular culture, and evidence of
their use can be found in the counter-witchcraft charms sold by Welsh and
English cunning-folk. 152 The birth of new evangelical, mystical, and prophetic
movements, such as the Swedenborgians, also sustained a favourable environment
for the continued interest in Neoplatonic magic in certain social circles, mostly
among inquisitive young men from artisan or middling-sort backgrounds. Yet a
chapbook grimoire revolution never happened. This is remarkable considering
that, in the period, English and Scottish publishers produced huge numbers of
chapbooks on astrology and divination. Apart from love spells there was very little
practical magic in these chapbooks, and none of the healing charms and spirit

Fig. 12 A magician at work. From the Conjurors Magazine (1792-3).

134 I Enlightenment and Treasure

conjurations found in the Continental examples. " Scot's Discoverie and the Fourth
Book could easily have been plundered, and copies of the Petit Albert were being
sold by London booksellers and could have been pirated, but they remained
largely untouched. 5 The only work comparable to the Continental chapbooks
was Witchcraft Detected and Prevented: or The School of the Black Art Newly Opened,
which was printed in Peterhead, Scotland, and went through at least three editions
in the 1 820s. It borrowed heavily from Scot's Discoverie and also included extracts
from an edition of the secrets of Albertus Magnus. There is no evidence to suggest
that it disseminated widely enough to have made an impact on popular tradition.

England's contribution to the diffusion of ritual magic and conjuration lay
not in the chapbook genre, but in the production of several expensive, hefty
compilations of early modern Neoplatonic wisdom. The first off the presses was
the work of one of the most influential occultists in modern British history — the
astrologer and Freemason Ebenezer Sibly (1751— c.1799). Sibly, the son of a
mechanic, had practised as an astrologer in Bristol, and by the time he moved to
London around 1788 he had already written his huge four-part work of occult
philosophy, A New and Complete Illustration of the Celestial Science of Astrology. Sibly
was no spirit conjurer, though, and condemned such attempts as wicked black
magic. The blessed angelic host, who were so crucial to the working of celestial
influence on Earth, were not at the beck and call of mere mortals. Nevertheless,
the numerous editions of the Complete Illustration provided a treasure house of
information on magical procedure, including a description of the infernal spirits
and their powers taken from the 1665 edition of Scot's Discoverie. 155 The sign-
ificance of this will be revealed in the next chapter. The Complete Illustration also
excited others to explore beyond the boundaries of magic acceptable to Sibly,
including provincial cunning-folk who evidently treasured the book. 156

Sibly moved to London at a time when, as the historian E. P. Thompson put it,
the capital was experiencing an 'explosion of anti-rationalism'. 157 There was a
heady mix of political radicalism inspired by the French Revolution, spiritual
interest provoked by the angelic communications and mystical writings of
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688— 1772), a surge in millenarian prophecy, and magical
experimentation. A short-lived periodical entitled the Conjuror's Magazine, or,
Magical and Physiognomical Mirror, was produced in London between 1792 and
1793. The capital's big booksellers, such as James Lackington, acted as important
repositories of magic. Lackington's 'Temple of the Muses' in Finsbury Square was
a London wonder. Above the entrance were the words 'Cheapest Bookseller in
the World'. 158 The shop of the occult book dealer John Denley contained one of
the best collections of magic books and manuscripts in the country. Before
becoming a Swedenborgian preacher, Ebenezer Sibly's brother, Manoah, had

Enlightenment and Treasure | 135

also been a more modest London dealer in occult works. Thanks to the Complete
Illustration of the Celestial Science Ebenezer also became a magnet for others wishing
to learn more of the occult sciences. One such disciple who removed to London
to consult from the master was a Lincolnshire cunning-man and self-publicist
named John Parkins. 159

During his sojourn in the capital, and shortly after Sibly's death, Parkins also said
he received instruction from another self-proclaimed adept of the occult sciences
named Francis Barrett. 160 Barrett, described in one newspaper report as 'a mini-
ature-painter, and an amateur of chemistry', was better known in his lifetime for his
failed ballooning exploits than his knowledge of magic. 161 Three times in the year
1 802 he drummed up a large paying crowd to see him attempt a balloon assent, and
three times he failed embarrassingly. Regarding his attempt at Greenwich, one
reporter complained, 'at no public exhibition do we ever recollect such a complete
want of management as at Mr. Barrett's Balloon,' while at Swansea the platform
collapsed as he began to address the crowd, damaging his balloon, and causing injury
to a number of spectators. He departed to the sound of hootings and howlings from
the crowd. Reporting on this third fiasco The Morning Chronicle stated, 'we hope it
will be the last. In short, he does not seem to posses a sufficient knowledge of
chemistry.' 6 Decades later, long after his ballooning disasters had faded from
popular memory, he achieved a degree of notoriety as the author of the first major
English discourse on spirit conjuration since the seventeenth century. The Magus: or
Celestial Intelligencer, published by Lackington in 180 1, ventured where Sibly refused
to go. It was, however, still little more than a compilation of material quite skilfully
culled from a range of books borrowed from John Denley. It relied heavily on the
seventeenth-century English editions of Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy,
the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, and the Heptameron. 163 Barrett considered his
work a contribution to the magical renaissance in the country: 'At this time,' he said,
'the abstruse sciences of Nature begin to be more investigated than for a century past,
during which space they have been almost totally neglected.' 164

At the time of its publication it proved no more successful than his ballooning
activities. Its distinctive, original colour plates of the heads of several principal
spirits rendered it expensive to produce. A review in The Critical Review began, 'In
vain do we boast of the progress of philosophy; — for, behold! In the beginning of
the nineteenth century appears a work which ought not to have surpassed the
fifteenth.' It went on to comment, 'It would be loss of time to criticise with
gravity so weak and ignorant a book.' 165 A couple of decades later it was fetching
high prices in the antiquarian book trade, and its impact on the country's popular
magic was very limited compared to Sibly's opus. A rare example of its use was
recorded in 1857 in a report on a visit to a Liverpool fortune-teller. The inves-
tigating journalist noted that in the diviner's study there was a large oval crystal

136 I Enlightenment and Treasure

'AT**-*/* f\, err.

.A

.7

tCu*<**J illz tHm*/ ^(Klt A vnyi^fr*™* f $i*t£

~2/7tJ*?7 /fa

Fig. 13 Manuscript title page of Francis Barrett's The Magus (1801).

lying on a copy of The Magus, a book which the fortune-teller 'professed to value
highly'. It seemed to serve, however, more as a prop than a well-thumbed spring
of magical knowledge. 166 In the long term, though, The Magus would become a
major influence on the middle-class occult revival of the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.

Enlightenment and Treasure | 137

What of his pupil John Parkins? If anyone was to write a populist grimoire at
the time he was the most likely candidate. He was a sophisticated exploiter of
print, producing puffs advertising his magical powers, talismans, and handwritten
copies of his own grimoire, The Grand Oracle of Heaven, or, The Art of Divine
Magic. 167 Such was the reputation he generated through his herbal and fortune-
telling publications, and his advertisements in the regional press, that his death was
even recorded in the respected periodical The Gentleman's Magazine. In 1830 it
noted the demise, at the age of fifty-nine, of 'Mr. Parkins, commonly called
"Dr. Parkins," a celebrated astrologer and fortune teller'. 168 Yet he never moved
into the chapbook grimoire market, even though he worked with chapbook
publishers. His Universal Fortune-Teller (1810), for example, was produced by the
London bookseller and publisher Thomas Tegg, one-time owner of the Eccentric
Book Warehouse in West Smithfield. Tegg produced an eclectic mix of high-
minded improving literature, gothic tales, and chapbook adventures. He also
produced a range of guides on stage magic and legerdemain. 16 '* Would Tegg
have added a popular grimoire to his stock if Parkins had presented one to him?
Probably not. British chapbook publishers evidently practised a degree of self-
censorship, particularly during the period of Revolutionary and Napoleonic
France, during which the British government kept a close eye on the printers.
Fortune-telling and a bit of love magic were all that was considered acceptable.
Any magical content darker than that was out of bounds, even if it was prefaced
with disingenuous provisos that such information was published as an illustration
of the superstitions of the past. An equation can be drawn with pornography. As
with grimoires this was a forte of illicit French publishing, but it was kept
relatively suppressed by both the authorities and political self-censorship amongst
British Radical populist publishers. 170

With The Magus being too expensive and difficult to obtain, and with Parkins
declining to go into the print grimoire business, the only other affordable source
of instruction on spirit invocation and talismans was to be found in the works of
Robert Cross Smith (1795— 1832). He was another Bristolian astrologer who made
his way to London, and soon found himself at the heart of a mutually supportive
group of astrologers and occultists during the 1820s. His first foray into occult
publishing was The Philosophical Merlin published by John Denley in 1822. It
purported to be a translation of a magical manuscript owned by Napoleon, but
was in fact a mish-mash of material culled from Barrett's The Magus. It was a flop
and most of the stock was remaindered. 171 Smith then took over the editorship of
a weekly periodical called The Straggling Astrologer, which contained a diverse
selection of articles, excerpts, and advice on astrology and magic. It folded after
only twenty-two issues, but in 1825 it was repackaged as a book entitled The
Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century, claiming bogusly to be in its seventh edition. It

138 I Enlightenment and Treasure

contained numerous talismans and spirit invocations, including incantations for
raising the spirit of a suicide. For this it was advised that:

the exorcist, being prepared with the pentacles of Solomon, the two seals
of the earth, and other necessaries, he must bind upon the top of his
wand, a bundle of St. John's wort (milies perforatum) , with the head of an
owl; and, having repaired to the spot where the corpse of the self-
murderer lies, at the solemn hour of midnight, precisely at twelve
o-clock, he must draw the circle, and having entered it, solemnly repeat
the following words 172

Smith claimed some of these conjurations and talismans were culled from ancient
manuscripts in the possession of the Mercurii, a secret magic society of which he
was a member — perhaps the only one. However, one was also attributed to
George Graham, a friend of Smith's, who was a disaster-prone occult balloonist
in the Barrett mould. Most of the extra material not culled from Sibly or Barrett
probably derived from Denley's collection. The Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century
unfortunately suffered a similar fate as The Philosophical Merlin. Its publisher,
Walter Charleton Wright, went temporarily bankrupt, as did the next owner.
No further editions appeared. 173 Smith's occult publishing career certainly
seemed ill-starred until he finally made money by entering the almanac market
under the nom de plume Raphael.

Caution on behalf of the chapbook publishers and over-ambition on the part of
occultists seems to have ensured that there was no grimoire revolution in Britain,
and consequently British print culture had a limited influence on the magical
traditions of its colonies around the world. Only Sibly had some impact in India
where there was a venerable and influential astrological culture receptive to his
English language opus. 174 Apart from an intriguing early nineteenth-century
American interlude, Britain's international influence would only emerge in the
second half of the century when a new breed of middle-class ritual magicians
began to form occult organizations and launch the next big exercise in magical
publishing.

Across the Oceans

We saw in an earlier chapter how grimoires soon found their way to the
Americas amongst the possessions of the early colonists. The flow was a
mere trickle though, and their cultural influence very kmited. With the expansion
of Atlantic trade during the eighteenth century, and the increasing number of
emigrants crossing the ocean, the influence of grimoires overseas was bound to
increase, but not everywhere and not with the same impact. The power of the
Inquisition largely prevented the substantial infiltration of European grimoires
into the Spanish colonies until the twentieth century, whereas the Bibliotheque
bleue led to French grimoires having a huge influence on the diverse medical and
magical traditions generated in the Caribbean. Let us turn first, though, to how
the grimoire slowly but surely inveigled its way into the heart of the cultural and
spiritual world of North America's British and German settlers, inspiring new
beliefs and uniquely American controversies.

By the late seventeenth century there is evidence that American cunning-folk
were using works of occult philosophy and practical magic, as well as English
books on palmistry and astrology. 1 In 1695 Robert Roman of Chester County,
Pennsylvania, was prosecuted and fined and costs for practising 'geomancy
according to Hidon and divining by a stick'. 'Hidon' is obviously a misspelling of
Heydon, for we find this author's geomantic text The Temple of Wisdom amongst
the three books confiscated from Roman. The other two were more overtly
magical — 'Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft, and Cornelius Agrippa's, teaching
Necromancy', the latter presumably a copy of the Fourth Book of Occult Philoso-
phy- 2 Moving further up the social scale, works on astrology, those of the London

140 | Across the Oceans

astrologer-physicians Nicholas Culpeper and William Salmon in particular, were
evidently not uncommon in the libraries of the prosperous elite of the early
eighteenth century. We have already heard of the impressive library of John
Winthrop Jr. That of Edmund Berkeley, a member of the Virginia Council,
contained a copy of Richard Saunders' palmistry manual, Physiognomy and Chiro-
mancy (London, 1653). This was the same sort of book — maybe the very book —
that landed Dorcas Hoar in so much trouble during the Salem trials. 3 The
Governor of New England, William Burnet, who died in 1728, owned a copy
of Turner's 1665 edition of The Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy. 4

The British by no means held a monopoly on Colonial American occult
literature during the early eighteenth century. The various German Protestant
mystical colonies in Pennsylvania were also foci for the accumulation of esoteric
and magic books. Millenarian Pietists, Mennonites, and Moravian groups from
the Low Countries, Germany, and Switzerland were drawn to the English colony
thanks to the religious tolerance instituted by the state's Quaker founder William
Penn. But religious peace and harmony had their limits, and once settled in
Pennsylvania schisms amongst pious Protestant immigrants led to further spin-
off sects following variant doctrines and new self-proclaimed prophets. While the
influence of Kabbalah and Rosicrucianism were evident in the teachings and
practices of a number of these religious communities, one group of German
colonists in particular was renowned for its occult interests. 5

Germantown, founded in 1683, was a modestly thriving Pennsylvanian settle-
ment by the time the followers of Johann Zimmerman, a Pietist mathematician,
astronomer, and adherent of the mystic Jakob Boehme, arrived there. Zimmerman,
who at one time taught at the University of Heidelberg, believed that the apoca-
lypse and second coming of Christ would occur in 1694. He believed the wilderness
of America an appropriately biblical location to await Armageddon and the new
millennium: he died shortly before setting sail from Rotterdam. His followers, a
brotherhood of learned Pietist men who had vowed to practise celibacy, chose
Johannes Kelpius, a young Transylvanian theologian to lead them. The group
arrived in 1694 and settled in huts along the Wissahickon Creek near Germantown
awaiting the new millennium. As soon as it became clear that Christ was not going
to return as predicted the thought of celibacy proved too much for some. After the
death of Kelpius in 1708 most remaining members drifted away. In the meantime,
those followers of Zimmerman who remained true to their initial guiding
principles, and were inspired by their mystical philosophy and intellectual curiosity,
immersed themselves in the occult possibilities of alchemy, Kabbalah, and astrology
during their hermit existence.

One of those original members who stayed on and continued his hermit's
existence was Johann Gottfried Sehlee (Seelig) (d. 1745), who apparently drew up

Across the Oceans | 141

horoscopes when requested, and who in his will bequeathed to a friend, ' 1 scale,
with gold and silver weights', which indicate alchemical activity, along with '5
bibles, 14 books, 10 ofjacob Boehmen's books, and 120 Latin, Dutch and Greek
books'. 6 His name would later become confused with that of a German publisher
on Judaism Gottfried Selig (1722—95), who produced a German language version
of the Jewish mystical text Sefer Shimush Tehilim concerning the magical powers of
the Psalms. In the early twentieth century this would reappear in a popular format
as Godfrey Selig's The Secrets of the Psalms.

Christopher Witt, an English physician, clockmaker, botanist, and occultist, was
another well-known figure who joined Kelpius in 1704 and remained in German-
town to the end of his life. A letter recounting a visit to Witt written in 1743
described his study as 'furnished with books containing different kinds of learning;
as Philosophy, Natural Magic, Divinity, nay, even Mystical Divinity'. He lent out
some of his books and evidently tried to enthuse others in magic. One botanical
acquaintance wrote, 'when we are on the topic of astrology, magic and mystical
divinity, I am apt to be a little troublesome by inquiring into the foundation and
reasonableness of these notions.' 7 One of Witt's friends, Christopher Lehman, who
had arrived in Germantown from Germany in 1730— 1, shared not only Witt's
botanical interests but also his occult philosophy, and amongst his surviving papers
there is a geomantic manuscript. The activities of this small group left German-
town with a long-lasting reputation for magic.

Germantown's only rival in terms of occult standing was Ephrata, which is now
in Lancaster County. Its founder was Conrad Beissel (1690— 1768), a Pietist baker
who had arrived in Germantown in 1720 expecting to find Kelpius's movement
alive and well. Disillusioned with the various sects he found instead, he set forth
into the Pennsylvanian wilderness and formed his own monastic-like community
for men and women who came to be known as German Seventh Day Baptists.
One of their main activities was the creation of impressive illuminated manu-
scripts. With the installation of a printing press in 1745 the Ephrata community
also became a major centre of Gothic type German language publication, and
producer of the occasional mystical and magical publication. 9

The private libraries of wealthy colonialists and Protestant mystics were not the
only repositories of European occultism. That admirable eighteenth-century
urban institution, the subscription library, also provided access to magical know-
ledge for those who had a few shillings to spare annually and the time to peruse
their holdings. The very first such institution, the Library Company of Phila-
delphia, founded in 173 1 by Benjamin Franklin, had, by the early nineteenth
century accumulated a 1651 edition of Scot's Discoverie, the 1651 translation of
Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, the 1658 edition of Porta's Natural
Magic, and a 1650 Latin edition as well. It also had copies of the new generation of

© a m I e St i $ a it b 6

©toartfonji'-bof.

l>foflriflenom wan tan ffirrofirfroa
(?g rifetom, Ipcfa oc&
anfcenfce.

I

19

1

■ ■

Fig. 14 Title page of Gamle Richards Swartkonst-hok (Karlshamn, 1832).

Across the Oceans | 143

magical disquisitions, namely a 1784 edition of Sibly's New Illustration of the
Celestial Science of Astrology, Raphael's Sanctuary of the Astral Art, and Barrett's The
Magus. 10 This must have constituted the largest public resource on practical magic
in the country at the time. Subscription libraries spread along the eastern seaboard
during the second half of the century and some of them held at least one or two of
the key works. The New York Society Library, to which some of John
Winthrop's books were donated, possessed a 1584 edition of Scot's Discouerie.
During the mid-nineteenth century grimoires also moved west with the gold
prospectors. In 1854 the San Francisco Mercantile Library housed a copy of
Agrippa's Three Books and an edition of the Arbatel of Magic, presumably extracted
from Turner's edition of the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy or a rare eighteenth-
century edition. 12 While admission to these libraries, whether private or public,
was restricted to a very small percentage of the population, they confirm that
America had its own palaces of occult enlightenment. It is not unlikely, further-
more, that these repositories generated manuscript grimoires produced by copyists
who did have access.

So far, our history of American magic has concerned the books that immigrants
took with them. It was only during the late seventeenth century that printing
presses were permitted in English territories. Around the same time the French
had banned all publishing in New France. Tellingly, the first publication produced
by the first printing office in Pennsylvania was an astrological almanac released in
1685, and others followed. The success of the American Almanack, compiled by
Daniel and Titan Leeds, which ran during the early eighteenth century, shows
there was considerable demand for such occult aid. Titan Leeds was the butt of
Benjamin Franklin's satirical wit when, in 1732, Franklin launched his own mock
astrological guide entitled Poor Richard's Almanack. Franklin was one of the most
influential men in eighteenth-century America, a scientist, statesman, and later a
national hero for his role in ensuring the success of American Independence. Poor
Richard's purported author was an astrologer and 'friend' of Titan Leeds named
Richard Saunders. Over the next few years Poor Richard's Almanack regularly
speculated on Leeds' death, to his understandable chagrin. The mock formula
was as big a success as the earnest astrological almanac, selling up to 10,000 copies
annually during the quarter century of its existence. 13 Some no doubt bought it
under a misapprehension as to its contents. Years later, Franklin's spoof would be
the first American 'occult' publication to make a significant impression back across
the Atlantic. One French edition of Poor Richard's collected advice was translated
under the title le Chemin de la fortune, suivie de la veritable Poule Noire, ou la
Connaissance des tresors, and in Sweden as Gamle Richards Swartkonst-bok. 14 In
each case the popular fascination with grimoires was used to lure people into
reading a determinedly rationalist message.

144 I Across the Oceans

Until the late eighteenth century run-of-the-mill chapbooks were imported
from Britain in large numbers. They were reproduced locally only when imports
did not match demand, and this was due more to the economic restrictions of a
chronic shortage of rags for paper than the hindrance of the censors. 5 We get
some sense of the influence of and concerns regarding such literature from the
writings of Revd Ebenezer Turell of Medford, Massachusetts. He had maintained
a sceptical stance during a local case involving some girls who maliciously claimed
to be tormented by witches, and evidently considered popular literature, and the
'devil's playthings' it contained, to be responsible in part for the continuance of
such pernicious beliefs. He wrote in 1720, 'Young people would do wisely now
to lay aside all their foolish books, their trifling ballads, and all romantick accounts
of dreams and trances, senseless palmistry and groundless astrology'. 16

It was not until after the War of Independence that American publishers began
to pump out the wide range of chapbooks available on the Continent. Amongst
them, inevitably, were versions of the run-of-the-mill cheap fortune-telling and
dream books that had proved so popular in England, such as The New Book of
Knowledge published in Boston in the 1760s, and The Universal Interpreter of Dreams
and Visions (1795). 17 The popularity of such literature was boosted further by the
huge growth of legal and illicit lotteries — the urban treasure trove of the nine-
teenth century. In 1 826 one critic of these lotteries described how whole streets
were being converted into lottery shops, with 'boys standing at every corner to
thrust printed schemes and advertisements of lucky lottery offices into the hands of
the passers by.' 18 The most popular of the schemes was the policy system based
on the selection of three numbers. By mid-century American dream books
included three-number combinations in relation to different visions. One edition,
for example, attached the numbers 2, 7, and 41 to dreams about ants. 19

Several versions of the enduringly popular Dr Faust chapbook were printed in
Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Connecticut during the 1790s. As elsewhere,
they may have excited some young men to seek out the means of conjuring up the
Devil. The story was no doubt already well known to both English and German
settlers in the colonial period. 20 But otherwise, during the nineteenth century, the
seeker of practical magic in America remained dependent primarily on seven-
teenth-century English printed editions and German manuscripts. Until the
publication of John George Hohman's Der lang verborgene Freund in 1820, which
will be discussed in a later chapter, all that was produced other than astrological
almanacs and simple fortune-telling tracts were the decorative, German language
house-blessings and celestial letters or Himmelsbrief printed in Ephrata and else-
where in Pennsylvania. 21 As in northern Europe, copies of these blessings and
apocryphal correspondence were commonly hung on walls or kept on the person
to protect against illness during childbirth, fire, and evil.

Across the Oceans | 145

So far I have been exploring the presence and possession of grimoires as part of
a wider emigration of occultism across the North Atlantic, but to what extent
were they actually used and for what? There is certainly little evidence that any of
the educated elite with their large libraries actually practised spirit conjurations
and the like; their occult interests were mostly philosophical, astrological, or
alchemical. By the early nineteenth century, however, the Germantown mystics
were characterized as practical magicians in reminiscence and folklore. A history
of Pennsylvania written in 1829 suggested that although Witt's medical practice
flourished, the 'superstition of his neighbours, probably rendered his profession of
necromancy the more lucrative.' He acted as a cunning-man, detecting the
whereabouts of stolen goods, identifying thieves, and combating witchcraft.
He was also said to have trained up others in the practical occult arts including his
successor in the cunning-trade Dr Frailey, a Germantown resident whose one-
story house was decorated with German poetry painted in oil colours. 23 As to the
reality, Witt, Lehman, and other leading Germantown residents like John Seelig
certainly cast nativities and followed astrological principles — Witt evidently on a
commercial basis. He provided a certificate, an example of which survives, to at
least one student confirming his successful training in the 'Arts & Mysteries of
Chemistry, Physick, & Astral Sciences'. 24 As to the use of practical magic garnered
from grimoires, the main evidence is the corpus of anhangsel or zauber-zettel,
amulets and talismans, created by the occult adepts of the Pennsylvanian German
Pietists for the benefit of their communities. These magical lamens, containing
astrological and angelic signs like those espoused by Paracelsus, were usually
drawn on parchment and paper and were widely worn among German settlers
to ward off evil spirits, witchcraft, gunshot, and ill health. Some were engraved or
stamped in brass, silver, and even gold. A nineteenth-century historian of the
Germantown mystics possessed one such brass, a wunder-sigel, which was warmed
with a flame and impressed on the skin of humans and animals at the spot where
their malady was manifest while a charm was spoken. This branding technique
was also used to prevent cattle from straying or being stolen — something you do
not see in Hollywood westerns. 25

Pirate treasure

As in Europe, the search for treasure provides us with the most references
regarding the use of grimoires in the eighteenth century. America may not have
been dotted with the ruined monasteries, castles, stone circles, dolmens, and hill
forts that attracted treasure legends across Europe, but this did not prevent settlers
from creating a new geography of treasure — one based on buried pirate booty

146 I Across the Oceans

supposedly secreted by the notorious William Kidd and Jean Lafitte, lost Spanish
gold mines, and ancient Indian treasure. 26 The West may have had its gold rush in
the mid-nineteenth century but, long before, the countryside of the northeastern
Atlantic seaboard was dotted with the explorations of those seeking hidden riches.
In 1729 Benjamin Franklin co-wrote a newspaper essay highlighting the 'prob-
lem', bemoaning the great number of labouring people who were bringing their
families to the brink of ruin in search of 'imaginary treasures'. The physical signs of
their activities were apparent around and about Philadelphia. 'You can hardly
walk half a mile out of Town on any side, without observing several Pits dug with
that Design,' Franklin moaned. He took a particular swipe at the role of astrolo-
gers, 'with whom the Country swarms at this Time', in promoting such fruitless
endeavour. The article contained a mock letter from one such devotee of the
celestial art who boasts of having 'read over Scot, Albertus Magnus, and Cornelius
Agrippa above 300 times'. A hundred years later the town's residents could still
point out the various spots were holes had been dug. 27 It is possible that the
popular preoccupation with treasure hunting during the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries was fertilized by German immigrants. Although England
had long had a tradition of treasure hunting, which had caused particular concern
to the authorities in the mid-sixteenth century, by the eighteenth century it was
by no means as strong as it was in parts of Germany, where as we have seen
numerous prosecutions took place during the eighteenth century.

The author of a 1767 comic opera — indeed the first American opera — wrote in
the preface that it was partly written with the aim 'to put a stop (if possible) to the
foolish and pernicious practice of searching after supposed hidden treasure'. 8 The
plot of the Disappointment concerns four Pennsylvanian gentlemen who test the
credulity and cupidity of four tradesmen by concocting a story of Blackbeard's
hidden booty, the location of which is revealed in a map sent by the English sister-
in-law of one of the pranksters. One of the gentlemen, Rattletrap, pretends to be a
conjuror, no doubt modelled on the Germantown magi, who offers to use his
magical knowledge to ward off the spirits of Blackbeard's crew, which guard the
treasure. Amongst his accoutrements are a hazel staff, magnet, telescope, an
ancient quilted nightcap, and a 'brass bound magic book'. 'This book my wonders
contain', he boasts, 'Twou'd deceive the devil himself, And puzzle a conjuror's
brain.' He learns some arcane words from reading the canto of Hudibras and
Sydrophel, which together with his mathematical knowledge 'qualify him for a
modern conjuror'. 2 ^ At the site where the treasure is said to be hidden Rattletrap
draws a large circle in the ground with his wand and plants twelve pieces of wire
around it each with a paper cut into the shape of a star. Then the pseudo-
conjurations begin, 'Diapaculum interravo, tenebrossitas stravaganza!' 30 In a side
plot a female character also pretends that a 'Dutch almanac' is a grimoire,

Across the Oceans | 147

explaining, 'y ou must know when I was about fifteen years of age, I lived at
Germantown with my uncle, a high German Doctor, who could tell fortunes,
find stolen goods, discover hidden treasure, lay spirits, and raise the devil. And his
whole art is contained in this little book.' 31

The Disappointment is generally thought to have been written by Colonel
Thomas Forrest (1747— 1825), a Philadelphian congressman who in his roustabout
youth pulled off a very similar prank to that recounted in the opera. He gulled a
German printer into believing that he possessed the dying testimony of a pirate
named Hendricks, who was hanged at Tyburn, in which he revealed where he
had buried his pot of money. The tailor called in an adept of the black art named
Ambruster, who said he could conjure up Hendricks to give up his booty.
Ambruster's method required no grimoire though, as he merely shuffled and
read out cards on which were inscribed the names of the New Testament saints. 32

As elsewhere, conjurations were not necessarily required to retrieve buried
treasure. Divining rods, which had a pseudo-scientific reputation, were used to
locate precious metals for example. But as treasure was often thought to be
guarded by the spirits of pirate prisoners and slaves, deliberately killed so their
ghosts were bound to protect their masters' booty, none but the most rational
treasure hunter dismissed the importance of supernatural aid. American treasure
seekers seem to have relied mostly on the Bible and the psalms rather than magical
conjurations, though there are examples of magic circles being employed. While
this is understandable, considering the Bible was the only widely available occult
repository during the eighteenth century, English grimoires with explicit treas-
ure-seeking advice, namely Scot's Discoverie and the Fourth Book of Occult Philoso-
phy, were present in America. Furthermore, although there is no mention of the
St Christopher Prayer in American sources, it is quite possible that ethnic German
settlers brought copies with them. In the late nineteenth century, American
editions of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses were used. 3 Digging deeper
into the history of grimoires in American treasure hunting brings us to the most
contentious and current debate regarding magic in America — the occult activities
of the founder of the Mormons.

Mormons and magic books

Joseph Smith (1805—44) was brought up on a poor farm near the town of Palmyra
in New York State. During the 1 820s he and his family were involved in a series of
expeditions looking for ancient treasure and Spanish silver mines in and around
the area, and further afield in Pennsylvania. Smith Snr and Jnr were useful people
to have along as they were reputed for their divinatory skills, particularly the use of

148 I Across the Oceans

seer- or peep-stones in which they could see visions of hidden treasures and much
else besides. It is clear that the Smiths, like other treasure seekers at the time, also
employed magic circles and talismans in order to deal with guardian spirits. Smith
Jnr also claimed to have received divine communications. From 1823 onwards he
was subject to a series of visitations from an angel named Moroni, son of the
prophet Mormon, who, according to Smith, had been a soldier and historian
during the reign of an ancient American civilization that collapsed around 400 ad.
Moroni told Smith that he was the guardian of two golden plates containing a
chronicle of its thousand-year existence. The Lord God Jesus Christ had ordered
Mormon to compile it and Moroni completed it. Moroni told Smith he had
buried this 'Golden Bible' in a stone box in a hill not far from Palmyra after a great
defining battle between the Nephites and Lamanites. These were two Israelite
tribes who arrived in the promised land of America around 600 bc. In September
1827 Moroni let it be known that Smith was to be permitted to dig up the golden
plates in order to translate the hidden history they contained. The Book of
Mormon was born. 33

During the early years of the Mormon movement critics used rumours and
testimonies of Smith's treasure-hunting and magical activities to denounce
and ridicule his nascent Church. As the movement eventually grew in numbers
and influence after its move to Utah, the focus on its activities shifted away from
magic and treasure to the controversial practice of polygamy. During the 1970s
and early 1980s, however, Mormon and non-Mormon scholars began an earnest
reappraisal of the occult activities of Smith and his early followers. In 1985 wider
public awareness of Smith's treasure seeking was reignited. Mark Hofmann, a
well-known dealer in early Mormon archives, claimed he had discovered the
written testimony of an early Mormon regarding Smith's experience of digging
for Moroni's golden plates. Known as the 'White Salamander Letter', it related
how Smith had encountered a salamander in the stone-lined pit containing the
plates, which transformed itself into a guardian spirit that initially denied him the
treasure. When suspicion was aroused about the authenticity of the letter and
other Mormon artefacts Hofmann had sold to the Church, he tried to cover his
tracks by setting two bombs for people he had dealt with, killing two. He is now
serving a life sentence.

Of all the books and articles that appeared in the 1970s and 1980s it was a study
by the Mormon historian Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World
View, that caused the most controversy. Quinn synthesized a huge amount of
primary and secondary sources to trace the origins of and influences on Joseph
Smith's magical practices, and how they fed into early Mormonism. A revised
edition was published in 1998 in which Quinn bolstered his claims with extensive
endnote references, and prefaced it with a self-reflexive account of how the

Across the Oceans | 149

critical reception of the original book had impacted on his professional and
personal life. As a Mormon, Quinn came under sustained attack for his work,
losing his professorship at Brigham Young University. Quinn argued that the
content of the Book of Mormon, whether written by Smith or divinely translated by
him, was influenced by the literary tradition of early modern and eighteenth-
century hermeticism, Kabbalah, and mysticism. 36 Others had already made these
connections but Quinn went further than anyone in trying to trace the exact
sources of Smith's magical possessions.

Quinn analysed three surviving magical parchments, and a dagger inscribed
with the occult Seal of Mars, all of which the Smith family had evidently
cherished. 37 One of the Smith charms, described as the 'Holiness to the Lord',
concerned the communication with good angels. Another, 'Saint Peter bind
them', served a protective function, and the third, 'Jehovah, Jehovah, Jehovah',
was also a protective amulet. 38 Quinn rightly suggested that several of the symbols
they contained were taken variously from Scot's Discoperie (1584), the 'discourse'
attached to the 1665 edition of Discoverie, or extracts reprinted in Sibly's New and
Complete Illustration of the Occult Sciences. 39 The 'Saint Peter bind them' and
'Holiness to the Lord' parchments, for example, contained the symbol of the
angel Nalgah, which was only depicted in the 1665 edition of Scot's Discoverie and
Sibly's opus. The 'Holiness to the Lord' charm also contained a magical seal found
in all editions of Scot's Discoverie. Quinn also believed that a silver talisman or
lamen with the seal of Jupiter possessed by Joseph Smith had been copied from
one in Barrett's The Magus. 40 He further suggested, less convincingly, that a
symbol of the Moon consisting of two back-to-back crescents presented in the
Magus was also the source for Smith's prophecy to another prominent Mormon,
Alpheus Cutler, that 'two crescent moons with their backs together' would appear
to him when the time had come to reorganize the church. 41

Quinn's reconstruction of the popular magical beliefs of the social milieu in
which the Smiths and their followers lived is convincing, and is supported by the
work of other historians of eighteenth-century American religious cultures.
Furthermore, as we have seen, it mirrors the continuance of similar magic
traditions in the European countries from where the Smiths and their followers
emigrated. While there is no evidence that the Smiths owned copies of Scot,
Sibly, or Barrett, there is little doubt that the Smith parchments were used for
overtly magical protective purposes, and were derived primarily from Scot and
Sibly. Yet Quinn's conviction, that the Smiths were practitioners of traditional
magic was outrageous, even heretical, to the hierarchy of the Church of the Latter
Day Saints.

Numerous attacks were launched against Quinn's thesis, but I shall focus on
that of the Mormon scholar William J. Hamblin published in 2000. In this

150 | Across the Oceans

lengthy, scholarly, and meticulous rebuttal, Quinn's book was described as 'un-
mitigated nonsense', and Hamblin further advised that it 'should not be taken
seriously as history'. 42 Part of Hamblin's critique rests on the availability and
nature of occult literature in late-eighteenth-century America. Hamblin makes
some pertinent criticisms. Quinn certainly conflated cheap and easily available
fortune-telling tracts and astrological works with grimoires and other scarce works
of intellectual magic. In doing so he gave the impression that magical literature
circulated widely in Philadelphia and New York State at the time. Yet by this
period American astrological almanacs, as in England, had very little magical or
'occult' content. 43 I am also inclined to agree with Hamblin that it is highly
unlikely that the Smiths owned a copy of or had access to Barrett's The Magus. 44
True, as we saw earlier, there were copies available in American libraries at the
time, but a few years after its publication it had already become a rarity in England
let alone America, and second-hand copies were expensive. When a copy of The
Magus owned by the English-born American theatre impresario William Burton
was auctioned in i860 it was described as 'extremely rare'. 45 A copy sold in
England the year before was advertised as 'very scarce' and cost £1 8s. 46 For
this reason there is little evidence of English cunning-folk possessing or using The
Magus let alone American ones.

When it comes to the sources for what Quinn asserted were Smith's ritual knife
for making a magic circle, Hamblin overplays the scarcity of Scot's Discovery as a
possible source. For Hamblin it 'is the least likely that Joseph would have
obtained'. 47 In fact it is the most likely. The 165 1 and 1665 editions were
frequently being sold at auction in England during the late eighteenth century
for a price usually between 5 and Ss. In 1772 the bookseller Benjamin White even
offered a copy of the 165 1 edition for a very reasonable 25. 6d. 4H Compare these
prices with the first edition of Sibly's New and Complete Illustration, which was
being sold for between jQi 95. and^i 155. during the early 1790s — more than four
or five times the average price of the much older Scot editions. 49 It is hardly
beyond the realms of possibility that some of these editions went overseas and into
the hands of humble Americans on the eastern seaboard. As to Sibly's New and
Complete Illustration, which Hamblin describes as so rare that he was unable to
consult an edition, numerous reprints in the early nineteenth century would have
made it realistically purchasable. 50 It was certainly quite widely used by English
cunning-folk. Furthermore, Hamblin's belief that Scot's Discoverie was not used as
a book of magic — 'it is not a book designed to help someone learn how to be a
magician' — is also contradicted by the English evidence. 51 It has been shown that
the Discoverie was a key source of magic charms during the nineteenth century,
with the character of Nalgah and the magical seal in Smith's 'Holiness to the Lord'
charm being used in charms concocted by English and Welsh cunning-folk. 52

Of Good and Evil Dxmons.

foils and Spirits.

Angels, and give liolv C urm ajat' rh T W the naW$ and P 0 ™" ot
addrelt unto by Prayer , re i a nt^n^ ' S ° f f V " D " m " : ■*

tio? a? t?,T, c 0ne ° f thC Pott L « 5wl l 0 ''"i"^ ability of fubfervientadminiltra-
j.amr>, rypitymg Ins nature in that appearance.

UrtS^ Angel, caulinghis Pupil to go invilible, and tranfporting Ivm ac
uis picaiurein a moment, to the outmofl pans of the earth.

VaUlW the Inltrufter in Manual operations, by whom Betduh, and Ahli-
M -were divmely infpired for the itntflre of, he Tabernacle.

Kamaum, who it the Mmferin Cabalillical Magiek, and reveals the fe-
crees ot numDers , the names of Angels, and the vertue of Bom,.

7- Tlicfe are the feven lad Angtl, or Dtmmi.

As the power and capacity of tf,e,jW, proceeds from the Itrength of God, The mU of
in illegality of heaven; fo isthetorceot ttietvHOnii, in the heTli/h quality l«h.
correfpondent : for it is to be noted , that tbefe ml Angd, d,d before their
tall, enjoy the lame places and degrees that now the rood or holy A«,<l,Ao:
fo that as their power is to inllruft men in Governmem.Abltinence.Pliiiorophy,
Mag.clc, and Mechanick Arts for a good intent, and for the glory of God :
J lie power of the ml ones is the very fame to inform and inltigate unto the fame
attainments, asfarr as they may beinltrumentalfor the Devil, or the Kingdom
of Darknefs therein. "

8. Their names are t.£anatcarp,likeaCrocodilewithtwo heads, i. Kara- The (evcnnii
troll appearing like a Conjurer in a Priertly habit. ; jSonOeiinap like a Gf «'. "drtw
Hunts-man. 4. tfjeijmooal accompanying his Pupil like a Spaniel-Do<\ ™* oncr *
5- IBaUiCargon die grand Inticer to thecving and robbery , till he hath ™ * ppe *"
brought Ins lollowers to dellruftion. 6. (^ojbofStan who can put on various
likencfles, efpecially appearingas a Serving-man. 7. Barman who molt com-
monly poilelleth the foul of thole that are joyncd unto him.

9. Thefe

Fig. 15 Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London, 1665).

152 I Across the Oceans

Quinn's thesis does not stand or fall on the basis that Smith owned copies of Scot
and Sibly, since extracts from all three were to be found in the manuscript
grimoires and charms kept by some English cunning-folk, and in those sold by
the London occult bookseller John Denley. It is quite likely that some of these
found their way to America where they were copied once again.

It is not surprising that the Mormon faith was, in part, born out of the magical
milieu of the period. Whether Protestant or Catholic, German or British, magic
was a central aspect of most people's conception of Christianity in colonial
America. Colonization itself was inspired not only by commerce but also by
supernatural inspiration. Confronted by the challenges of their new world,
European emigrants, insecure as to their future, understandably placed reliance
on the magic of their homeland cultures. The search for treasure was part of a
wider quest for security. Cunning-folk, and diviners like the Smiths, were,
therefore, valued members of their communities, and more so if they were
perceived to have physical and linguistic access to literary as well as oral sources
of occult power.

New France

During the early nineteenth century a group of Pennsylvanian German farmers,
Mennonites and Amish, trekked north and settled in Ontario, mostly in what is
now Waterloo County. They brought with them their distinctive magical rem-
edies and folk medicine, and the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses can be found in
legends recorded in their communities at the end of the century. 33 But it was the
French grimoire tradition and not the German that had the most substantial
influence on Canadian popular magic.

The history of French emigration to Canada contrasts strikingly with that of
Germans and the British to North America. 54 The Catholic French were reluctant
emigrants, and the Huguenots were barred from settling in French territories. By the
end of the seventeenth century New France covered a huge swathe of the eastern
half of America and Canada, but it was only in the latter that emigration was
significant enough to generate a lasting French cultural presence. Quebec was
founded in 1608, and two other permanent settlements, Trois-Rivieres and Mon-
treal, had developed into small towns within a few decades. Yet although at least
27,000 French came to Canada in the period from 1608 until its surrender to
the British in 1763, some two-thirds returned to their homes, predominantly in
Normandy, Poitou, and the Paris basin. By that time, French Canada or Quebec had
a population of around 70,000, made up primarily of those born in the territory
descended from seventeenth-century pioneers, along with disbanded soldiers,

Across the Oceans | 153

refugees from Acadia (mostly consisting of the former French territory of Nova
Scotia), and petty criminals exiled there during a period of penal transportation
between 1721 and 1749. Following British rule French emigration reduced to a tiny
trickle. In the 1851 census only 359 people in Quebec had been born in France. 55

In June 1682 a Montreal innkeeper Anne Lamarque was tried for practising
magic principally on the basis of her possession of a mysterious book. Anne was
born in the diocese of Bordeaux and was married to another emigrant named
Charles Testard, who was from Rouen. Their hostelry was evidently popular, but
the downside was that gossip soon spread amongst her customers regarding a book
that she was seen holding. Numerous witnesses came forward to testify that they
had seen her with a 'book of magic or sorcery'. One described it as a 'huge book
four or five inches square and the thickness of a finger or thereabouts, handwrit-
ten, in a bold hand and in both French and Latin, and some Greek words'. Serious
doubt was cast on the evil nature of this book, however, when one witness, a
lodger whose curiosity had been aroused by the gossip, testified that he had asked
her if it was true that she had a book of magic in Latin and Greek. She replied that
it was no such thing, it was merely 'a book of herbs or medicines'. 56

We find little further evidence regarding grimoires in Canada until the nine-
teenth century, though as Lamarque's case shows, rumours about them circulated.
It is likely that some copies of the Petit Albert found their way there in the packs of
settlers and soldiers before the British takeover. Copies could also have been
brought over and traded by seamen. In the early twentieth century a Quebec
man told a folklorist how an uncle had come by a copy of the Petit Albert from
some French sailors and had lent it to his family. His father threw it into the fire. 57
Despite the potential demand, however, in 1861 it was estimated that no more
than twenty-five to thirty copies could be found in the province. 58 If this was so,
then the Petit Albert's cultural influence far outweighed its actual presence in
Quebec society. It was central to Canada's early literary heritage. Just as the first
American opera was concerned with treasure hunts and magic books, so the first
French-Canadian novel, L'Influence d'un livre, similarly centred on alchemy,
treasure, and the Petit Albert — the 'livre' in the title. 59

Written in 1837 by Philippe Aubert de Gaspe, the son of a Quebec lawyer, this
gothic story primarily concerned a poor Canadian alchemist called Charles Amand,
who in the 1820s could be found in his cabin on the south bank of the St Laurent
River poring over his Petit Albert day and night in his quest to create precious metals.
A footnote in the text referring to one of his failed ritual conjurations to achieve this
goal notes that Amand's Petit Albert was not one of the run-of-the-mill copies of the
grimoire. His 'true' copy was tellingly obtained from a Frenchman. 60 The story also
concerns the search for hidden treasure and the desire to obtain the Hand of Glory,
the recipe for which was the most notorious aspect of the Petit Albert. One reviewer

154 I Across the Oceans

criticized the way that the novel portrayed his countryman as being so 'superstitious'
as to practise magical rituals, and thought it would have been appropriate to set it
further back in time before education had enlightened the people. 61

In 1861 a book was published in Quebec with the enticing title Le Veritable Petit-
Albert ou secret pour acquerir un tresor. But this was not the first Canadian grimoire. It was
an attack on such works by a Quebec typographer and social commentator named
Joseph-Norbert Duquet. The first half of the book provided an account of the history
and content of the corpus of chapbook grimoires available in France at the time. To
demonstrate their pernicious influence he also provided some accounts of the recent
prosecution of cunning-folk in the mother country. He then went on to relate
various cases of treasure seeking in Quebec. The second half of the book consisted of
a discussion on the social and economic structure of the province along with
'improving' advice and rational recipes for the labouring classes of Quebec
to whom the book was dedicated. His concern was that Canada should defend itself
from the corrupting forces at play in Europe and America, amongst them the
influence of the Petit Albert and other populist occult works. These had 'spread
strongly in America; but fortunately in Canada, we can say with rightful pride, we are
far from the sale of thousands of copies of this cheating book to the inhabitants of our
rural areas.' Duquet was a staunch supporter of the social and moral importance of the
Church in Quebecois society, and he praised its role in suppressing the Petit Albert,
as well as commending the French-Canadian libraries that refused to stock it. 62

For Duquet the most obvious sign of the Petit Albert's, influence in Quebec was
the continued practice of magical treasure hunting in the province. In 1843, for
example, a group tried to conjurer up a treasure guarded by ghosts buried in or
around Chateau Mctavish near Montreal, which was built in the late eighteenth
century by a hugely wealthy Scottish fur trader and businessman. As to those who
engaged in such activities, Duquet wrote:

Tell him that you have the Petit-Albert, or some other book of marvellous
secrets, and then you can be certain of pulling at the heartstrings of all his
desires. You will see his face bloom with happiness, his eyes light up,
mouth open, and his chest heave, a sigh escapes followed by this request:
'Ah! Monsieur, if you would be so good as to provide me with the Petit-
Albert, or the Dragon rouge or else the Grimoire, you would make me happy
a thousand times'. 63

Duquet's book was a massive hit in Quebec publishing terms. It sold 3,000 copies
in a matter of weeks, at a time when successful novels sold only a thousand copies
or so. 64 While his aim was to destroy the belief in grimoires surely the only reason
for the book's success was that many people bought it under the mistaken
assumption that it was an edition of the actual Petit Albert.

Across the Oceans | 155

The influence of French grimoires is more difficult to assess in Louisiana, the
only area of North America that maintained a substantial French language culture
after the demise of New France. The word 'Cajun' is a corruption of 'Acadian',
referring to those French settlers who were forced out of Nova Scotia by the
British in the mid-eighteenth century and who subsequently settled in Louisiana.
Today Cajuns are generally presented as synonymous with French Louisiana, yet
they were not a large population and had little direct contact with France
compared with those settlers in Quebec. Furthermore, any consideration of
French influence on magical cultures in the region needs to consider the input
of Creoles, French-speaking Native American Indians and, most significantly,
slaves and ex-slaves. Eighteenth-century advertisements regarding runaway slaves,
mostly from Louisiana and St Domingue but also from across the eastern seaboard,
confirm that French was quite widely spoken amongst the black population, and
by the early nineteenth century French-speaking slaves and former slaves were a
major influence on French language and culture in the southern states. 65

One rare nineteenth-century reference to the Petit Albert in Louisiana is in George
W. Cable's classic novel of Voodoo, racism, and murder in New Orleans, Ttie
Grandissimes, published in 1880 but set in 1803. It contains a scene in which a
Paris-educated 'free man of color', Honore Grandissime, visits a German-American
New Orleans apothecary to obtain a love powder. 'M'sieu',' he asks, 'vous etes
astrologue — magkieri . 'God forbid!', replies the apothecary.

'You godd one 'P'tit Albert.'

He dropped his forefinger upon an iron-clasped book on the table,
whose title much use had effaced.

'That is the Bible. I do not know what the Tee Albare is!'

This literary reference is hardly concrete evidence of the grimoire's use at the
time, but the scenario is perfectly reasonable. If the Petit Albert was a significant
element in the magical cultures of French Louisiana it was most likely due to
Caribbean rather than Acadian influence. As one recent major study of Creole
French culture affirms, throughout the Creole world the 'Petit Albert, Grand
Albert, and to a lesser extent, Dragon rouge are major and constant references.' 66
How did this come about?

Creolization

Colonization, slavery, and immigrant labour in the Caribbean and the Americas
generated a fascinating and diverse fusion of beliefs and practices regarding
religion, magic, and medicine, derived from European, African, Asian, indigenous

156 I Across the Oceans

Carib, and Amerindian cultures. In the British colonies the Orisha religion
developed in Trinidad and Tobago, and in Jamaica we find the collection of
magical practices known as Obeah. In Guyana there is Comfa, and on the French
islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe the magical practices known as Quimbois.
Amongst former Spanish colonies we find Santeria in Cuba and Espiritismo in
Puerto Rico. Candomble developed in Brazil. Most well known outside the region
is, of course, the Haitian spirit religion Voodoo. 67 The African influence in these
religious traditions depended on the tribes from which different slaving countries
took their terrible cargo. The African elements in Comfa can be identified as
Bantu, while the word Obeah derives from the Ashanti. Elsewhere Yoruba beliefs
were a major influence in Santeria and Voodoo. The latter, also termed vaudou,
vodou, and vodoun at different periods and in different cultural contexts, means
'spirit', and derives, along with other deities in its pantheon, from a group of West
African languages spoken particularly in the kingdoms of the Yoruba and Fon. 68
Turning to the European influences, Catholicism and its demonology dominates
not surprisingly. After all, up until the mid-nineteenth century, it was the only
permitted religion across much of the region. But the Church's conception of
Catholic worship was far from uniformly understood and adhered to in European
popular cultures. White migrants brought with them their own folk conceptions
of the magical efficacy of religious practices, which had affinities with other non-
European cultures. Saints, African deities, and indigenous spirits could rub along
together, while charms and talismans were adapted to incorporate the magical
potency of local flora and fauna. Just one example of this is the tradition of
mandinga pouches in Brazil. As a series of eighteenth-century Inquisition trials
reveal, these protective pouches were a fusion of the African Islamic tradition of
the alherces containing passages from the Koran, the European tradition of wearing
printed or written prayers mingled with occult symbols, and indigenous amulets.
One of those confiscated by the Inquisition, and used to instil bravery consisted of
a prayer to Jesus and St Cyprian and a piece of altar stone. Others contained a dead
man s bone.

Scholarly interpretations of the processes by which these new religious and
magical traditions grew out of the established religions of Europe, Africa, and to a
lesser extent India, have changed over the past fifty years or so. The concept of
'acculturation' was widely applied until recently. In historical and anthropological
contexts the acculturation process has been understood generally in terms of
dominant cultures, usually European or American, deliberately supplanting or
suppressing what were seen as inferior or less 'advanced' cultures, by means of
force, religion, education, and media. This concept, however, does not entirely
square with religious developments in the Caribbean. What European authorities
attempted in terms of promoting and enforcing Christianity, and suppressing

Across the Oceans | 157

African beliefs and practices, by outlawing Obeah for example, was certainly
acculturation. But they did not fully succeed. Aspects of Christian liturgy, pri-
marily Catholic, were key ingredients in the syncretism or blending of religious
traditions that took place because of, and to a certain extent in defiance of,
colonial rule. The term creolization — Creole referring to persons born in the region
who have non-native ancestry — encapsulates better this complex creative process,
which was beyond authoritarian control. The creolization of religion and magic
may have been forged out of cultural repression and violence, but its development
was one of continuing cultural negotiation, fusion, and adaptation.

The European literary esoteric tradition, as well as the oral, played a major part
in this creolization of Caribbean beliefs. The Bible was, of course, hugely
influential, but for a more recent introduction we can look to the growth of
Kardecism. In the mid-nineteenth century a French schoolteacher and author of
pedagogical texts, Hippolyte Leon Rivail, developed a spiritualist doctrine distinct
from the American spiritualism born in 1848. For Rivail contact with the spirits of
the dead convinced him of the reality of reincarnation, opening up a new
philosophical and moral doctrine for life and the afterlife. It was during a seance
that spirits informed him that his name in a former life was Allan Kardec, and it
was this he adopted when writing his most important works, The Book of the Spirits
(1857), The Book of Mediums (1861), and The Gospel According to Spiritism (1864). 70
Within a few years they had been translated into Spanish and quickly became
hugely influential in Latin America — more so than in Europe. They were adopted
initially by the liberal middle classes who were disillusioned by the conservative
political grip of the Church. By the twentieth century The Gospel According to
Spiritism was apparently achieving better sales than the Bible in Puerto Rico,
despite being banned. 71 Kardecism also flourished in Brazil with the first Spiritist
society being created in the late 1860s in the face of hostility from the Catholic
Church. Over the decades, Brazilian Spiritism developed into a form distinct from
Kardec's initial teachings. It became a religion rather than a philosophical-ethical
system, feeding into other Afro-Brazilian religious systems, such as Umbanda,
which are based on the healing abilities of mediums working through spirit
communications . 72

The reception and absorption of European grimoires in South and Central
America was rather more complex. Seen as potent sources of physical as well as
spiritual empowerment, grimoires were viewed by some indigenous peoples as the
pernicious tools of foreign colonizers. The Quiche Indians of Guatemala, for
instance, came to believe that some sorcerers (ajitz) who caused harm learned
their powers from books of magic, described to one anthropologist as 'books of the
Jews'. 73 For some indigenous Indians in southwest Colombia magia, which they
define as deriving from books of conjurations that allow one to pact with the Devil,

158 I Across the Oceans

are considered to be an instrument of social control. The whites had brought magia
with them, and as one Indian complained, 'They use it to take our land.' 74 These
perceptions were not only born of suspicions regarding Christian magic but were
also an aspect of wider concerns about how books were being used as a means of
enslavement. We see this expressed in a magic tradition found amongst the largely
indigenous Quichua population of the town of Salasaca, Ecuador. In the provincial
capital of Ambato lies the seat of a 'witch-saint', Saint Gonzalo, patron of the main
church, who is believed to kill people through a book in which victims' names are
written. The main focus of this belief was not the large statue of San Gonzalo,
which depicts him with a sword plunged into his back and blood trickling down his
face, but a small copy of the statue in private ownership. It is the blancos (whites)
who own the latter, and who are the guardians of a large 'witch book'. People pay
them to include the names of their enemies, who the saint will then curse, or
conversely to have their names removed. This is no legend, but a real money-
making activity for the guardians, who have on at least one occasion been charged
with adding names to the book to extort money.

The anthropologist who studied this tradition, and was surprised and suspicious
to find his own name in the book during a visit, suggests it is not just the book and
the power of writing that has shaped this belief and practice. 7 It is the implicit
association Salasacas make between it and their experience of record keeping by
the predominantly white Church and secular administration. The witch book is
no mock grimoire with occult signs and pictures of the Devil; it is a functional
large notebook consisting of lined paper, not unlike those used for Civil Registry
and Church record keeping. In other words, the archival function of books,
which serve as a means of social control in an administrative sense, can also be
used to subjugate through magical means — an echo of the early modern witch
trials and the belief in the Devil's book.

In much of the Caribbean the pattern of colonial experience was different to
that of parts of Central and South America. Islands shuffled between Spanish,
French, and British rule, with each colonial power imprinting their linguistic and
cultural influence to varying degrees. The remnant indigenous populations had to
negotiate not only with European hegemony but also with the cultures of African
and later Asian arrivals, and vice versa. The grimoire was not necessarily seen
wholly as the white man's legacy. In Martinique, Creole legends developed
regarding the Livre Caraibe, which was thought to contain all the magical secrets
of the Caribs written in Latin. People also told of notorious black magic books
with 'Holy Bible' on the cover supposedly distributed by a St Lucian evangelist
around 1900. 76 When the Haitian writer and communist activist Jacques Roumain
was incarcerated in Port-au-Prince prison during the late 1920s, the country being
under American occupation at the time, he requested a copy of William

Across the Oceans | 159

Seabrook's recently published populist account of Haitian magic and Voodoo, The
Magic Island, which was simultaneously published in French. His guard refused
suspecting that he might use such a book to escape through magical means. His
suspicions were understandable. Seabrook's book provided translated excerpts
from a Creole grimoire found on the body of the rebel commander Benoit
Batraville, who was shot dead by American marines in 1920. It included instruc-
tions on how to call up the dead, a prayer against bullets, a charm to protect against
torture, and a spell to ensure one's release from prison. 77

The French connection: sacrifice and science

In 1885 a newspaper correspondent to the Philadelphia Press described the accou-
trements of the 'West Indian Obeah Man'. They included a 'cabalistic book (albeit
he can seldom read), full of strange characters, crude figures, and roughly traced
diagrams and devices, which he pretends to consult in the exercise of his calling'. 78
One such manuscript was found on a magic worker named Adolphe Lacroix,
executed in St Lucia in 1876 for the murder and mutilation of a disabled boy. 79 A
few years later a folklorist astutely remarked that 'The book of magic, with its
diagrams, sufficiently indicates that "Obeah" sorcery in the West Indies has been
affected by European influences.' 80 The British may have been the most dominant
colonial power at the time, but it was the grimoires of their French rivals that
seeped deeply into the psyche of the Caribbean.

Although, as we have seen, grimoires were present in early colonial America, it
was in the former French colonies that they first became a concrete, visible,
attainable, and pervasive reality for people of whatever economic or ethnic
background. To be more precise, it was the French Bibliotheque bleue grimoires
that first gave the Caribbean its literary magic tradition. In Martinique, for
instance, La Poule noire, and the Grand and Petit Albert were all frequently men-
tioned in popular discourse on magic, and considered evil by those that did not
use them. Le Dragon rouge was perhaps the most evil of all, it being thought that the
Devil could be summoned by standing under a fromager tree (Ceiba pentendra)
with a copy. A perusal of the libraries of Martinique cunning-men or quimboiseurs,
and those in the Antilles, reveals that the Albert titles and Le Dragon rouge were
common enough. A Guadeloupe sorcerer prosecuted in 1953 owned, amongst a
range of more recent French works on exorcism and occultism, Le Dragon rouge
and the Grand and Petit Albert* 1 However, La Poule Noire, Clavicule of Solomon,
Grimoire du Pape Honorius, and the Enchiridion du Pape Leon were more talked
about than circulated on the island. 82 It was the Petit Albert that had the most
demonstrable influence on magical practices.

160 | Across the Oceans

In the British Windward Islands during the early twentieth century there was
some suspicion that the French-speaking portion of the population practised the
more sinister aspects of Obeah. Robert Stephen Earl, a British Commissioner and
medical officer in the Virgin Islands at the time, observed that blood was more
important amongst patois speakers in the Leeward Islands, particularly in Domin-
ica, which although it had been ceded to Britain in 1763 retained a strong French
influence. In the Virgin Islands police had arrested one man with numerous Obeah
accoutrements who was returning from Santa Domingo (Dominican Republic).
The same police force was also suspicious of a man who had recently arrived from
Martinique with a cock, which they suspected he subsequently sacrificed in order
to find treasure. 83 There was a strong Anglo-Saxon perception that there was
something about the French that exacerbated the sinister aspects of Caribbean
'superstition'. One of America's early leading sociologists, Ulysses G. Weatherly,
wrote in 1923 that the French, in comparison with the English, were

more congenial to the simpler nature of the African. They had less of race
prejudice; they crossed more willingly with the blacks .... They also had
more gaiety, a keener artistic and dramatic sense, and less rigorous
attitudes. Once in full contact with French national culture, the Negro
was likely to readily absorb its type and long retain its influence.

No surprise then, according to Weatherly's view, that fragments of the 'great
magic books of the Middle Ages' passed into Obeah and 'the dim ghost of Albertus
Magnus flits in and out'. 84 One of his colleagues, the respected early-twentieth-
century historian of the Caribbean, Frank Wesley Pitman, put a different emphasis
on the 'failure' of French policy. He postulated that the French authorities' policy
of education and the promotion of the assimilation of European culture backfired.
'Catholicism was fetishized by French Negroes,' he explained, 'and the almost
complete reversion of Haytians to barbarism in the nineteenth century is a sad
commentary on the futility of the work of the French.' The British, who had been
less dedicated in their educational provision, had, he thought, been more suc-
cessful in eradicating 'the atrocious tendencies of fetishism'. 85

British visitors to the country back in the 1820s and 1830s had already made
snide observations about the inability of the French-trained Catholic clergy to
suppress 'superstition' and 'heathenism'. 86 While the British authorities explained
this with smug reference to their better administration, later the finger also
pointed to the pernicious influence of French grimoires. They may have had a
point. It is possible the Martiniquan mentioned earlier was following the ritual of
the Poule noire contained in the Dragon rouge. Pitman suggested that the strength
of Voodoo in Haiti was perhaps due to the fact that the 'sacrificial prescriptions
for child-murder, receipts for hidden treasure, and prayer formulas were early

Across the Oceans | 161

committed to print in a sort of manual for obeahmen published at Nantes in patois
and atrocious Latin.' He meant the Petit Albert. 87

Animal sacrifice, usually a chicken, was certainly a part of Obeah, Comfa, and
Voodoo rituals, used as offerings to the spirits along with food and libations to
ensure good harvests and the like. The killing of a chicken and the sprinkling of its
blood was a common foundation ritual to ensure the protection of new dwellings.
Such magic was an integral part of the religious worship in the West African
regions from which most of their slave ancestors were taken, and similar founda-
tion rituals requiring the burial of an animal were also widely practised in Europe.
As we have seen, the sacrifice of a chicken was also a key element in diabolic pacts
in France. In other words, such animal sacrifice was just another area of common
tradition in the multicultural mix that was Creole magic. There was a widespread
belief amongst Europeans that human sacrifice and even cannibalism were also
practised by adherents of Voodoo in Haiti, and by magical practitioners in other
French-speaking colonies. Haiti's pre-eminent and enduring reputation for ob-
scene and horrific Voodoo rituals was cemented by the popularity of the sensational
accounts provided in Sir Spenser St John's Hayti, or the Black Republic (1884).
St John was a well-travelled journalist who in 1 863 took up a post as charge d'affaires
in Haiti, later becoming consul-general. 88 His stridently critical account of the
country was reviled by Haitians but widely read in Europe and America. When it
came to a second edition in 1889 he added further details, stating he had
'underrated' the 'fearful manifestations' of Voodoo. His accounts of terrible Voodoo
rituals, seen as a hangover from the barbarous practices of African ancestors, were
taken as fact and became the key source on the subject for several decades. Their
apparent veracity was reinforced by St John's account of a trial he had attended in
1864 concerning apparent sacrifice and cannibalism in the village of Bizoton, near
the capital Port-au-Prince. Eight people were found guilty of murdering a
twelve-year-old girl named Claircine and then eating her flesh for magical
purposes.

Even before the second edition of Hayti, or the Black Republic appeared, the
American folklorist William W. Newell was waging a scholarly campaign to dispel
the malodorous myth of child sacrifice that clung to the country. He dismissed
St John's accounts as unsubstantiated hearsay, highlighting the pernicious influ-
ence of local and international newspapers in peddling sensational false accounts,
such as the report that human flesh was on sale in Haitian markets.'' 0 As to the
1864 case, just like those in early modern Europe who confessed to participating in
the Sabbat, the defendants had been tortured into confessing their supposed
heinous activities. St John reported that one young defendant pleaded in court,
'Yes, I did confess what you assert, but remember how cruelly I was beaten before
I said a word. ' But to St John, who was no stranger to enacting brutal suppression

162 I Across the Oceans

on disturbers of the peace, torture seemed justified. He believed that the defend-
ants had initially refused to speak due to believing that their Voodoo spirits would
protect them, and so 'it required the frequent application of the club to drive this
belief out of their heads.' Newell consulted B. F. Whidden, the first minister of
the United States to Haiti in the 1860s, who had also been present at the trial.
Whidden believed the prosecution was unfair and that the stories of Voodoo
sacrifice and cannibalism circulating at the time were mere rumour sometimes
maliciously spread. There was no more cannibalism in Haiti than in Jamaica, he
concluded.

Newell had his own theory as to the origin of the lurid legends of Voodoo
sacrifice and cannibalism circulating in Haiti. They originated in old beliefs and
superstitions regarding the diabolical activities of a medieval sect brought to the
island by French immigrants. This theory was built around the mistaken idea that
the word Voodoo derived from the term 'vaudois', a name given to the followers of
the medieval Waldensian heresy in Alpine France, which around the mid-
fifteenth century became synonymous with satanic witchcraft. Vauderie became
another term for 'sabbat'. Where Newell was right, however, was in underlining
that there was a significant French influence on the nature of sacrifice in Creole
religions. It was left to others to identify grimoires as the source of inspiration, and
another case of apparent ritual murder in 1904 seemed to confirm it.

Rupert Mapp, a twelve year old was lured to the island of St Lucia from his
home in Bridgetown, Barbados, on the pretence that he would be employed as an
errand boy. 92 Mapp spoke only English and must have had little inkling of the
plans being hatched for him during his brief time in French-speaking St Lucia.
The man who brought him over was a licensed butcher and magical practitioner
named Edmond Montoute who had spent some time on Haiti, apparently evading
imprisonment for forgery. Montoute took the boy to the house of an old friend
St Luce Leon, a prosperous small farmer. There, on the night of 29 September,
and with the help of another man Edgar St Hill, Mapp was strangled, his heart was
ripped out and his hands cut off at the wrist. The body was buried and Leon was
set to work pounding salt, presumably to preserve the hands and heart. Montoute
said he would send him some other stuff to sprinkle over them.

When Montoute was arrested shortly after, police found in his house a bloody
rag, two serpents' skins, five pieces of bone, some sulphur in rock and powdered
form, and a phial containing a dark liquid. More to the point, in Montoute's
pocket they found a mysterious manuscript in French. When it was produced
during his first appearance before a magistrate, Montoute said it did not 'contain
anything of any consequence. It is an old manuscript book of prescriptions which
I carried with me when I went to St. Luce's house as I was treating him for an old
disease.' Edgar St Hill's testimony suggests it was something more than a mere

Across the Oceans | 163

collection of medical receipts, and was, in fact, the key to the murder. Shortly
before they slaughtered the boy, Edgar said that Leon 'asked Montoute whether
he had read the book again.' Montoute replied, 'since I read it this morning I do
not require to read again.'

The exact purpose of the murder was never fully clarified during the trial. It
was assumed by the authorities to be some awful Obeah ritual. Edgar St Hill
provided conflicting statements. Initially he confessed that Montoute had asked
him to go to Barbados to get two boys that they would sacrifice to the Devil in
order to obtain money from a bank. He later said, however, that he had gone to
Leon's on the night of the murder to help in the cure of Leon's hernia. This was
somehow to be achieved by Montoute hypnotizing St Hill. On awaking from his
trance his two friends pointed to Mapp's mutilated body lying on the floor and
accused him of having committed the atrocity while under hypnosis. St Hill's
mention of a diabolic plan to enrich themselves by getting money from a bank,
coupled with the mysterious book owned by Montoute and the severing and
preserving of Mapp's hands, suggested another alternative: they were seeking to
create Hands of Glory to render them invisible and so enter the bank unseen.
Their inspiration? The Petit Albert of course. Montoute's manuscript was appar-
ently identified as being a copy of the grimoire during the trial. All three men
were executed. Recent anthropological studies confirm that stories of human
sacrifice continue to circulate in the Caribbean. One study of folk religion on
Montserrat suggested that if the reports of goats sacrificed on rocks and the ritual
murder of a young girl were to be believed, then such actions 'seem to be
influenced by European, Medieval Cabalistic books'. 93

Thousands of miles away in the Indian Ocean the colonial history was quite
different to that in the Caribbean in the sense that there were no native popula-
tions. Nevertheless, grimoires took a similar hold on the Creole psyche. The
Mascarene Islands of Mauritius, Rodriguez, and Reunion were uninhabited until a
permanent presence was established in the early seventeenth century, consisting
mostly of runaway slaves brought there by Dutch and Portuguese traders. It was
the French, though, who stamped their cultural identity on the islands and
developed their economies, taking permanent control over Reunion in the
1 640s and Mauritius and Rodriguez in the early eighteenth century. African slaves
were brought to Mauritius and Reunion in significant numbers, followed later by
Chinese and the more culturally influential Indian immigrants as the East Indies
trade route developed. Although the islands were seceded to the British during the
Napoleonic Wars, Reunion was returned to the French in 181 5.

The history of grimoires highlights the strong French influence on the two
islands that remained under British colonial rule. We can see this in English
reports from Mauritius during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

164 I Across the Oceans

expressing concern over the influence of the Petit Albert. In 1879 the British
judiciary on the island dealt with a horrific case of murder that reminds one of
the St Lucia murder twenty-five years later. It concerned a sorcerer named Virgile
Picot, who abducted and mutilated a six-year-old girl apparently to obtain human
flesh for a magical ritual. Picot was thought to be deep in 'Petit Albert'. This did
not mean he possessed a copy of the grimoire. For the authorities the name
expressed more than a book; it was the magical tradition. A correspondent
reported from the island in 1884 that its 'professors' were 'generally negroes
with a sprinkling of Indians among them, and, although they practise on the
lines laid down in "Petit Albert," not one in 20 ever saw the book or could read it
if laid before them. The precepts it contains are handed down by word of mouth.'
He went on to talk of the 'believers' in and 'priests and priestesses of "Petit
Albert" ' amongst both the poor and wealthy Creole population. In 1928 the
British Bishop of Mauritius wrote in the Church Times, in similar vein, complain-
ing of the hold sorcery had over the island: 'witchcraft or Petit Albert is practised
by many thousands of persons . . . Petit Albert is nothing less than the cult of the
Devil.' 94

By the twentieth century it is fair to say that the Petit Albert had achieved
legendary status across the archipelagos, even if most inhabitants of the islands
have never seen let alone read it. On Rodriguez Island, for example, it has been
observed that 'everybody knows titalber, without knowing exactly what it is.' 95
Judging from the corpus of twentieth-century anthropological studies it is in
Reunion, the only one of the islands to remain a French colony, that the Grand
and Petit Albert have had the most enduring influence on magical and medical
traditions. 96 One renowned Reunion healer during the 1980s was the son of poor
farmers who, as a young man, learned his calling from frequenting various Indian
cults active in the town of Saint-Pierre and reading French esoteric works such as
the Grand Albert. He combined these foreign traditions with his knowledge of the
healing properties of local plants and animals. 97

There has been considerable debate amongst anthropologists of folk medical
traditions in the Caribbean, the Americas, and the Mascarene Islands about the
origins of the beliefs and practices recorded in the twentieth century. One area of
contention concerns the humoral conception of human illness. Ancient Greek
physicians believed that health was governed by the balance of four substances,
yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm. Illnesses were caused by the imbalance
of these substances, which led to excessive heat/ cold, moistness/ dryness in the
body. Cures required the ingestion of foods, liquids, or herbs that had hot/cold,
wet/dry properties that counteracted the identified imbalance, or methods like
bleeding that reduced humoral excesses. It was the writings of the ancient Greek
physician Galen that sealed the orthodoxy of this theory in European medicine

Across the Oceans | 165

right into the eighteenth century. It is still with us in popular notions, such as that
being in the 'cold' can cause a cold. Similar concepts have been identified in
the various popular medical traditions of the Caribbean and Central and South
America. Although some have argued that they derive from similar indigenous
medical notions, there is evidence pointing to a European rather than native
origin. 98 We need to be aware, though, that humoral theory is not uniformly
central to medical beliefs across the region, and other therapeutic principles, such as
those based on spirits, coexist with humoral causation. Where the European
influence was strongest it presumably spread slowly but surely over the centuries via
hospitals, pharmacies, and missionaries. Galenic medicine was still being taught in
some Central and South American universities until the early nineteenth century,
long after it had been banished from the curricula of European universities.

It was popular access to literature that had the most effect. Manuscript recetarios, or
household medical receipt books, which borrowed from more august tomes first
printed in the early modern period, certainly circulated in Mexico during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 100 The role of grimoires in this process has
been little considered, though it has been suggested that humoral theory introduced
to Haitian folk medicine by the early French colonialists was revived and perpetuated
through the widespread circulation of the Grand and Petit Albert during the nine-
teenth century. 101 Much of the Grand Albert and the medical content of the Petit
Albert, such as the 'curious secrets touching the effects of nature', were clearly based
on humoral theory. The strong grimoire influence on folk medicine is certainly
confirmed by changing conceptions of medical-magical power. A study of Carib
settlements in Dominica suggested that by 1945 the indigenous healers, who cured
by going on soul flights to intercede with the spirits on behalf of clients, had largely
died out. The role of these healers had been usurped by divineurs whose power was
based on skills learned from literature, with the Albert books being the main source of
spells and healing recipes. 02 Across the Caribbean such book magic was defined as
'science'. As one old Obeah practitioner from Santa Domingo and the Windward
Islands told a folklorist in the early 1970s, the way to invoke the dead to help you was
to go to a cemetery around midnight with 'a Black Arts book' and make 'necroma-
ney, making science'. 0 A practitioner on Montserrat who described himself as a
'scientist' explained, 'I have read a lot of books written by occult scientists; we draw
symbols and words from the ancient Egyptians which would cast away or protect
from the evil influence.' 104 Working with 'science' was dangerous for all but the
adept. Those who merely dabbled with the likes of the Petit Albert or the Grimoire du
Pape Honorius risked madness and suicidal impulses. Only the gadedzafe healers of the
Antilles could read them because they already possessed 'the power' and the natural
gift to access their contents without harm. 105

166 | Across the Oceans

Islam

If French grimoires acted as multicultural glue, and were easily adopted by a wide
variety of religious and magical traditions, why did they not become influential
in French Africa? The answer lies in the influence of Islamic popular religion. As
we have seen, magic, divination, prophecy, and astrology had an equivalent
influence on medieval Arabic literary culture as they did in Christian Europe,
and continued to do so into the modern period. Writing in the early twentieth
century Reginald Campbell Thompson, an expert on ancient Semitic magic,
noted from personal experience, that 'from Morocco to Mesopotamia, books of
magic are by no means rare, and manuscripts in Arabic, Hebrew, Gershuni, and
Syriac can frequently be bought.' 106 A recently uncovered eighteenth-century
Iranian magic manuscript is an excellent example of the sort of manuals carried
across the region by wandering fortune-tellers and healers. It consists of a mix of
Arabic Koranic talismans and Persian spells. One talisman depicted, for instance,
carries the following advice: 'He, who eats the roasted testicle of a black cat, can
never be satisfied by intercourse, [and] who copies this talisman and binds it to his
right hand, the enemies of him will be cast down.' 107

The Islamic folk magic tradition continues to thrive in modern print culture as
well. By way of illustration Campbell Thompson mentioned that in the Sudan he
was offered a poorly printed astrological work with rough, worn-out woodcuts.
In modern Cairo manuals on how to prepare amulets and talismans, and how to
deal withjmn or demons are 'available in the streets everywhere'. 108 The Shams al-
ma' arif (Illumination of Knowledge) written in the thirteenth century by Al-BunT,
which is one of the most enduringly influential Arabic works on talismans, magic
squares, and protective prayers, was being printed in India during the 1880s and in
Cairo around 1900, and continues to influence more recent Islamic magic books
in northern and western Africa. 109

To put this Islamic influence in a colonial context we can turn to the experi-
ence of the Mende tribe of Sierra Leone. As in much of West Africa, the first
literary cultures that impacted significantly on the Mende world view were those
transmitted by Arabic traders, migrants, and missionaries. This was long before the
Christian European influence permeated through the repatriation attempts of the
anti-slavery Sierra Leone Company in the 1790s, and the region's subsequent
adoption as a British colony. It was the Koran, rather than the Bible or European
esoteric traditions, that consequently became most deeply engrained in Mende
conceptions of literary magic. 110 Mandingo and Fula marabouts, Islamic holy men
and healers, became a major part of the Mende's magical outlook. A similar
situation existed in other parts of colonial West Africa. Pagan rulers in nine-
teenth-century Ivory Coast and Ghana relied considerably on the services of

Across the Oceans | 167

Islamic marabouts to help maintain their aura of spiritual power. Just like many
European cunning-folk, the marabouts made considerable play of their books, and
used them to construct Arabic charms consisting of passages from the Koran, or
magic squares and symbols from manuscripts and printed works of medieval
origin. These were considered holy texts, which, when written on slips of paper
and kept as amulets, had protective functions against the supernatural. 111

So, the venerable Islamic tradition of literary magic that infused through trade
and cultural contact, acted as a buffer against the European grimoires made
available through colonial rule. While colonial French Africa was largely Islamic,
significant areas of British West Africa and the Caribbean were either Christian-
ized or beyond the influence of Islamic religious tradition. Though there is
evidence of Islamic written charms, alherces, being brought over to the Caribbean
and Latin America during the early modern period and eighteenth century, by
either Muslim slaves or Spaniards, it was the Christian religious monopoly there
that sealed the dominance of the European magic books. 112 In the absence of
cheap British grimoires, entrepreneurial American publishers would step into the
magical breach.

Rediscovering Ancient Magic

In the nineteenth century archaeological revelations about the world of ancient
Egypt reinvigorated old conceptions of the country's place in the history of the
occult and inspired new magical traditions. But it is important to acknowledge
that ancient Egyptian culture was not as remote to the people of early modern
Europe as one might think. In learned medical practice pieces of Egyptian
mummies were prized for their potent blend of resins, gums, oils, and decayed
bodily fluids. 1 The Medici popes and prosperous merchants of early sixteenth-
century Italy generated an enthusiasm for Egyptian monumental architecture and
antiquities as part of a renewed respect for the military achievements of their pagan
ancestors, giving pride of place to the obelisks that had been brought back in the
heyday of the Empire. 2 In intellectual circles hieroglyphs fascinated the Renaissance
occult philosophers and alchemists. As with the Jewish Kabbalah, hieroglyphs
represented both the key to and substance of ancient wisdom, and their meaning
could only be revealed through divine communication or by intuitive inspiration.
For some they represented a universal code, the first language created by God.
Travellers and antiquarians examined them at first hand on the monuments
of Rome or in Egypt itself. Interest was further heightened by the publication of
Pyramidographia (1646), the first scholarly study of the Giza complex, written
by John Greaves. During the mid-seventeenth century the number of curious
European visitors to Egypt was sufficient for a French goldsmith named Louis
Bertier to run a successful cabinet of curiosities in Cairo. At a time when people
were being prosecuted and executed for witchcraft and conjuration across Europe,
Egypt maintained a reputation as the heartland of magic, the home of Moses the

Rediscovering Ancient Magic | 169

magician and Hermes Trismegistus. Greaves could not help remarking that 'the
Arabians and moors use much witchcraft in Cairo'. 3

Hieroglyphs had been depicted in print as early as 1505 with the publication of
the Hieroglyphica, a manuscript detailing the allegorical symbolism of the hiero-
glyphs. Like the Corpus Hermeticum it was discovered in the early fifteenth century,
and it was attributed to an ancient Egyptian priest-magician named Horapollo. 4
While occult philosophers and Renaissance magicians held hieroglyphics to be an
occult key, other scientists and philosophers saw them in a more mundane light.
The philosopher Francis Bacon, writing in 1605, dismissed their mystical inter-
pretation and determined that the hieroglyphs were far from being the sacred code
of a higher philosophical civilization. They were, he wrote dismissively, the
primitive means of recording the thoughts of a less advanced stage of human
society. 5 Still, how could Bacon know? No one could translate them, though
some thought they had cracked the secrets they contained. The most notable was
the Jesuit mathematician, cryptographer, and scientific showman Athanaseus
Kircher (1601—80). He wrote a series of publications on the subject, including
the monumental Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1654), in which he proudly set out not only
the meaning of the hieroglyphs but the origin of Egyptian civilization. He
believed that the hieroglyphs were the invention of Hermes Trismegistus.
While recognizing the simple phonetic and figurative representative basis of
hieroglyphs, and correctly observing analogies with other ancient writing, Kircher
was led almost entirely down the wrong path due to his adherence to the notion
that they encapsulated a secret symbolic meaning, that they were the language of
divine communication.

The mystical interpretation of the hieroglyphs and their link with Hermeticism
was reinvigorated during the second half of the eighteenth century by the
flourishing interest in Freemasonry. Up until this point, Freemasonry was mostly
inspired by the symbolism and mythology of Solomon's temple, the Kabbalah,
and the Knights Templar. The increasing antiquarian interest in Egypt now
entered the mix. 6 One manifestation of this appeared in the 1770s when the
French Freemason Antoine Court de Gebelin claimed that Tarot card images
constituted a symbolic essence of the Book of Thoth, thus encapsulating the
wisdom of ancient Egypt. Then there was Count Cagliostro. On a visit to London
in 1777 he founded his own branch of Egyptian Freemasonry. While riffling
through the barrows of a bookseller in Leicester Square, so the dubious story goes,
Cagliostro came across a manuscript treatise on the Egyptian origins of Free-
masonry written by one George Cofton, a man of whom nothing concrete is
known whether he existed at all. Through the aid of a translator the manuscript
revealed to Cagliostro that Freemasonry was founded by an Egyptian high priest
called the Great Copt in the time of the pyramid builders. The essence of this

170 | Rediscovering Ancient Magic

Egyptian Freemasonry was the goal of human reunification with the divine.
Cagliostro now set out to spread the message amongst his fellow Freemasons
across Europe, preaching that the Great Copt had personally charged him with
restoring the purity of Freemasonry from the devil worshippers and rationalists
who had corrupted it. He took to wearing a black silk robe with red embroidered
hieroglyphs while acting out his esoteric rituals. 7 A few years later, independent of
Cagliostro's Masonic revelation, the Freemason Ignaz Edler von Born, a major
figure of the Austrian Enlightenment, provided an alternative vision of the
importance of Egyptian religious culture to Freemasonry. Interpreted through
the prism of early modern Hermeticism, von Born saw the Egyptian priesthood as
the servants of science serving the welfare of the people, rather than as magicians
keeping them in dread thrall or a permanent state of spiritual readiness. 8

It was only with the discovery in 1799 of the Rosetta Stone, a black granite slab
inscribed with a Ptolemaic decree written in Demotic Egyptian, Greek, and
hieroglyphs, that translation was made possible. The Stone was found by a French
soldier working in the Egyptian town of Rosetta (Rashid) and was swiftly appro-
priated by a general based in Alexandria. When Napoleon heard of its discovery
he ordered that it be removed to the recently created Institut National in Cairo and
that copies of the inscriptions be made and distributed to the scholarly commu-
nity. With the surrender of the French to the British in 1801 the Rosetta Stone,
along with numerous other major antiquities, was packed off to London and took
pride of place in the British Museum. Thanks to Napoleon, though, scholars were
able to work on the inscriptions without having to travel to Britain, and within
two decades several had groped their way to partial understandings of the hiero-
glyphs. But, perhaps fittingly, it was a French philologist, Jean Francois
Champollion (1790— 1832), who, with his detailed knowledge of Coptic,
Demotic, and Greek, fully cracked the code in the 1820s. What his work revealed
was not a mystical language but a sophisticated means of recording the mundane
legal, fiscal, and administrative workings of a sophisticated society — and the
magical practices that underpinned its conception of life and the afterlife.

The discoveries made by the archaeologists who joined Napoleon's exped-
itionary force to Egypt between 1798 and 1801, and the beautifully illustrated
publications on Egyptian antiquities they produced, fired the imagination of
European urban society. The exhibits of the British Museum and the Louvre
became the most enduringly popular part of their collections. A dedicated Egyp-
tian Museum was founded in Berlin in 1850. Pyramids, temples, and sphinxes
influenced garden design and architecture. Egyptian features could be seen in the
streets of the European capitals. Londoners marvelled at the temple facade of the
Egyptian Hall, built in Piccadilly in 18 12, and which hosted numerous popular
exhibitions of curiosities from across the world. A report in the New York Herald in

Rediscovering Ancient Magic | 171

1 88 1 observed that 'it would be absurd for the people of any great city to hope to
be happy without an Egyptian obelisk.' 9 Mummies proved hugely popular with
public unravellings being put on by scientific showmen. They joined shrouded
ghosts as familiar supernatural beings in plays, stage magic, and fiction. 10

The old use of 'Egyptian' to mean 'gypsy', which had been used in English
vagrancy laws for centuries, fell out of usage. The gypsies' reputation for magic
was based partly on the notion that they originated from the magical land of
Egypt, and that some of the old magic of the priests and pharaohs was in their
blood. We have already seen that the German charm chapbook Die Egyptische
Geheimnisse (Egyptian Secrets) proved popular in eighteenth-century Germany.
Around the same time several cheap fortune-telling guides in Britain also played
on the tradition. The New and true Egyptian fortune-teller was, for example,
attributed to 'Ptolomy, King of the Gypsies'. Thanks to 'Egyptomania', however,
by the 1820s 'Egyptian' came to mean 'Egyptian' in such popular literature.
Romany gypsies retained a reputation for magic nevertheless, and with ethno-
graphic research relocating their origins to India rather than the Near East new
traditions emerged regarding their mystic Hindu powers. 11

Having Egyptian as distinct from gypsy associations became an increasingly
common claim of fortune-tellers, occultists, and the producers of practical occult
guides. The most popular of the latter was the dream divination manual Napoleon
Bonaparte's Book of Fate, which as the title suggests, was said to have been used by
the French Emperor. Most versions of this claimed that it was a German transla-
tion of an ancient Egyptian manuscript found in an Egyptian royal tomb in 1801
by one M. Sonnini — a reference probably to the French traveller and historian
Charles S. Sonnini, whose book Travels in Upper and Lower Egypt was published in
1800. 12 The first edition of the French grimoire La poule noire, printed in 1820,
also reflected the occult Zeitgeist. It described how the magical instructions it
contained derived from a French soldier in Egypt who was rescued from an Arab
attack by an old Turk who hid him inside a pyramid. The old man instructed him
in the secrets of ancient magic from manuscripts that survived the burning of
Ptolemy's library. The same story was repeated in another Bibliotheque bleue
grimoire that appeared a few years later entitled The Old Man of the Pyramids.

The new vogue for Egyptian association went down particularly well in
America where the old European traditions regarding gypsies had less relevance.
Charles Roback, a notorious mid-nineteenth-century American quack and cun-
ning-man, claimed he visited Cairo and the pyramids, then followed the Nile to
its source. 'I made myself familiar with all that could be elicited from the modern
Egyptians, respecting the incantations and prodigies performed by the priests of
ancient Egypt,' he boasted. In a village near ancient Thebes he said he collected
several astrological papyrus rolls written in cuneiform that served him well in his

172 I Rediscovering Ancient Magic

future career. " A survey of late-nineteenth-century American fortune-telling
advertisements revealed that many diviners claimed to have Egyptian ancestry.
'The Great Egyptian Prophetess, Sentinella Guzhdo', who circulated leaflets in
New Jersey, claimed her parents were born near Cairo and that she was 'a lineal
descendant of Zindello, king of one of the most ancient tribes of Egypt'. Her
ability to 'remove spells, and cure diseases' was due to charms carefully preserved
by her tribe. 14

It was only from the late 1820s onwards that the magic books of the Egyptians
were decoded for the first time. The most important find occurred shortly before
1828 when Egyptians digging for grave goods near Thebes found a cache of
magical papyri rolls written in Greek, Demotic, and Coptic. It is worth noting at
this point that from the late medieval period onwards, Egyptian treasure hunters
had used Arabic grimoires in order to conjure up treasures and deal with the djinns
and other spirits that guarded them. The most widely used text was The Book of
Buried Pearls, dated to the fifteenth century, which, like the Libro de San Cipriano in
Spain and Portugal, combined geographical details of sites where treasures lay
buried with the magical means of obtaining them. Cheap Arabic and French
versions were published in Cairo in 1907 on the instructions of Gaston Maspero,
Director of Antiquities in Egypt. Maspero and the editor of the publication, the
archaeologist Ahmed Bey Kamal, believed the Book of Buried Pearls had caused
more destruction to ancient monuments than war and the ravages of time. They
hoped that making such 'secret' knowledge more widely available would help
dispel the book's aura and undermine its pernicious influence. It was probably a
vain hope. Writing in the 1930s a former British Chief Inspector of Antiquities for
Middle Egypt noted that the book continued to be much studied by treasure
seekers. To give a taste of the advice it contained, here are instructions for finding
treasure near the pyramid of Cheops:

Make a fumigation with tar, styrax, and wool from a black sheep, and a
door giving access to a dyke enclosing four feddans will be opened to you.
Make then your fumigation and jump across the dyke, then dig into the
enclosed area, and you will find, at one cubit's depth or a little more,
some nuggets of gold. Take all you desire, continuing the fumigation
until you have finished.

As a footnote, in the 1920s the search for the 'lost' or legendary oasis and city of
Zerzura, supposedly situated in the Egyptian portion of the Libyan Desert, was given
fresh impetus by the discovery of a reference to it in the Book of Buried Pearls. 15

The sensational finds at Thebes, which would come to be known as the
Theban magical library, were swiftly sold to Giovanni Anastasi, the Swedish
consul in Alexandria. 16 This interesting character has a rather obscure background

Rediscovering Ancient Magic | 173

with various conflicting accounts of his origins. One suggestion is that he was
Armenian by birth, and arrived in Egypt around 1797 with his father, a trader who
supplied the French troops. What is certain is that Anastasi became a wealthy
merchant and prospered in the antiquities trade. He broke up the Theban magical
library selling parts of it to museums in Leiden and Stockholm, as well as to the
British Museum. Other significant discoveries appeared over the next few dec-
ades, but nothing matching the Theban library in scope and quantity. It is likely
that some of these later magical papyri, such as several rolls purchased from
Anastasi by the Louvre, were probably part of the cache found in 1828 but it is
impossible to prove conclusively.

Now the slow process of translation began. In 1830 the Dutch scholar Caspar
Jacob Christiaan Reuvens published excerpts of the Leiden rolls, and a few years
later a German translation of these appeared. Over in Britain, in 1853, one of the
papyri held by the British Museum was translated into English with a commentary
by Charles Wycliffe Goodwin. It was the Viennese papyri expert Carl Wessely
(1860-193 1) who did most to make knowledge of the Graeco-Egyptian grimoires
accessible. In the late 1880s he produced transcriptions of the Paris and London
rolls, while an edition of the British Museum's magical papyri was published
independently by Frederick George Kenyon.

Meanwhile cuneiform, the earliest form of writing used by Middle Eastern
civilizations such as the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Akkadians, was also being
deciphered, though with much less fanfare and public interest. German and
British scholars were at the forefront of cracking the meaning of the cuneiform
pictographs, but it was a Frenchman, Francois Lenormant (1837—83), the son of a
well-respected archaeologist who had accompanied Champollion on an exped-
ition to Egypt, who brought translations of this earliest written magic to the wider
public. 17 Lenormant made his reputation working on the archaeology of southern
Italy but he was also an authority on Near Eastern civilizations, though his
reputation suffered from accusations of forgery. It was his work La Magie chez
les Chaldeennes (1874) that added a new dimension to Western understanding of
ancient written magic. The book was based around what were known as the Evil
Spirit Texts, Assyrian— Babylonian cuneiform tablets containing spells and exor-
cisms to ward off devils, ghosts, and other malign influences such as plague. A few
years later English and German editions appeared, both of which went on to be
republished numerous times and can still be found in the Mind, Body, and Spirit
sections of major bookshops.

Despite all the academic interest in ancient civilizations — a professorial chair in
Egyptology was created at Berlin University as early as 1846 — the scholarly
community was not exactly consumed by curiosity regarding the secrets of the
magical papyri. 18 In fact the history of magic was not considered worthy of much

174 I Rediscovering Ancient Magic

serious attention at all. When, in 1875, Maspero produced an edition of a Demotic
magical papyrus he felt it necessary to excuse the publication of these 'magical
formulae without much interest for science'. He was trying to deflect such
criticism as that uttered by the scholar who complained that the magical papyri
'deprived antiquity of the noble splendour of classicism'. 19 In his review of
Kenyon's Greek Papyri in the British Museum (1893), the Cambridge lecturer
J. Rendel Harris observed regarding the magic rolls, 'To most people these are
very void of attraction. The recipes for raising spirits or for seeing one's own
double, side by side with plans for detecting thieves and for the expulsion of
vermin, are in themselves stupid enough.' He went on to argue though, that 'we
ought not neglect them simply because we find them made up largely of Coptic,
Hebrew and Syriac Abracadabra.' Magic, he concluded, was too near religion to
be neglected by scholars. 20

This message may not have attracted widespread sympathy amongst archae-
ologists and biblical scholars, but new academic disciplines that embraced it were
developing. Anthropology and the History of Religions were gaining respect. By
the end of the century professorial chairs in the History of Religion were created
in universities across Europe and in America, and dedicated journals appeared in
German and French. As an overview of the subject written in 1926 commented,
'It was the sign of a new spirit, a thrust towards objectivity, an effort to escape the
hampering hand of apologetics.' 21 At the heart of both disciplines in their early
years was the comparison of religious beliefs from across the globe in the search for
similarities that could reveal the cultural and mental evolution of humankind.
Thanks to the archaeologists and cryptologists, the genesis of ancient religions and
their relationship to magic could be pushed back beyond ancient Greece. Another
interested group who had a particular interest in this, and in tracing the possible
survival of ancient magic into the present, were those participants in what is
known as the Occult Revival of the second half of the nineteenth century.

Another magical renaissance

As we have already seen, despite the so-called Enlightenment the practice of
magic never disappeared in Europe, manifesting itself in the activities of treasure
seekers and cunning-folk, and in the rarefied esoteric religious and Freemasonry
movements of the eighteenth century. During the early nineteenth century new
pseudo-sciences such as mesmerism renewed intellectual interest in universal
hidden forces. It was spiritualism, though, that truly galvanized public interest in
the occult and provided a magnetic focal point for the swirl of disparate esoteric
groups and ideas circulating in educated society.

Rediscovering Ancient Magic | 175

From the simple 'y es '/'no' table-rapping sessions with the souls of the dead in
the late 1840s and 1850s, spiritualism developed in surprising directions, from the
quest to capture images of the spirit world using that new-fangled device, the
camera, to the later formation of its own organized religion. Spiritualism had its
mystical, esoteric angles as well, and Egyptology entered the mix, with the
adoption of Egyptian iconography by clairvoyants and in the reformulation of
the old conceptions of a universal spiritual truth. The journalist and poet Gerald
Massey (1 828-1907) is worthy of note in this respect. A working-class lad from
Hertfordshire, Massey was a Christian Socialist who found in spiritualism and
ancient Egypt the key to understanding modern man. 22 He wrote a series of books
on the origins and legacy of Egyptian civilization in which he came up with some
extraordinary claims. He was convinced, for example, that the five books of
Moses were Egyptian astronomical allegories. Adopting the comparative approach
of early anthropology he believed he had found linguistic and cultural traces
linking the British Celts with ancient Egypt and Africa. During the 1870s and
1 880s he conducted several lecture tours in North America and Canada explaining
his spiritualist and cultural theories to audiences already primed by similar home-
grown ideas, such as those of the Congressman Ignatius Donnelly. In a best-selling
book published in 1882 he posited that ancient Egypt and the Americas were both
part of the world of pre-Flood or antediluvian Atlantis, as proven by the existence
of pyramids and obelisks in both regions. 23

The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875, was the most influential occult
movement to form out of the spiritualist social ether. At one time or another most
occultists of the era either joined the Society or engaged with the writings of its
charismatic co-founder, the well-travelled Russian emigre Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky (183 1— 91). In her early career as a seeker of secret universal wisdom
Blavatsky had been much influenced by Rosicrucianism and Kabbalah, but by the
time the Theosophical Society was founded the focus of her spiritual tenets had
shifted eastwards to India and Tibet. It was there, she claimed, resided the
mahatmas or ancient holy men, adepts in the mysteries of the world, with
whom she maintained a direct psychic contact. It was they who dictated to her
the founding text of Theosophy, Isis Unveiled. 24

But what of the role of magic in this occult revival? Over and over again when
reading through the voluminous and often turgid library of occult expositions
produced during the second half of the nineteenth century, one finds one name
recurring over and over again: Eliphas Levi. This was the Hebrew pseudonym of
the son of a poor Parisian shoemaker named Alphonse Louis Constant (1 8 10-75) . 25
Levi trained to be a Catholic priest but left the seminary shortly before his
ordination, explaining later in life that he could not take his vows 'before the
altar of a cold and egotistical cult'. He never lost his Catholic faith however, just his

176 I Rediscovering Ancient Magic

respect for the Church. Following his mother's suicide, Levi, now scraping a living
from teaching, found his way into the mystical, political, and prophetic milieu of
backstreet Paris. He became a voracious reader of old and new occult works, and a
visitor to the Bibliotheque de V Arsenal. The first of his books on magic, Dogme et
ritual de la haute magie (1856), reveals a familiar set of influences. Kabbalah and the
Tarot underpin his conception of magic, though mixed with these we find the
more recent theories of mesmerism and animal magnetism, with Levi describing
how the aim of the magician was to control the astral fluidic forces that he believed
infused the Universe. He loathed black magic, the conjuration of devils and the
spirits of the dead, describing its practice and its manuals as 'an epidemic of
unreason'. 26 It was a view echoed by the generation of magicians he influenced.

Levi said he had studied numerous grimoires over many years and had come to
the conclusion that the only useful ones were all in manuscript and required
deciphering using the codes formulated by Trithemius; 'the importance of
others consists wholly in the hieroglyphs and symbols which adorn them.' 27
The Clavicule of Solomon was evidently one of the few legitimate grimoires in his
estimation, for in i860 he made an annotated manuscript copy of one version,
perhaps from a text in the Bibliotheque de VArsenal. 2S He knew well the Bibliotheque
hleue grimoires, dismissing them as 'catch-penny mystifications and impostures of
dishonest publishers'. In a discussion on love philtres he declined to provide any
examples from the Petit Albert, a book he described as common in the countryside,
remarking that its spells were 'either foolish or criminal'. Of the Grand grimoire
and its instructions for calling up the dead, he wrote, 'No doubt anyone who is
mad enough and wicked enough to abandon himself to such operations is
predisposed to all chimeras and all phantoms. Hence the recipe in the Grand
Grimoire is most efficacious, but we advise none of our readers to have recourse to
it.' 29 As a conscientious Catholic he had further reason to denounce grimoires
such as the Grimoire du Pape Honorius for they besmirched the pious reputations of
the saints and popes. Only the Devil could profit from such pernicious mischief
making. 30 The only good he could find in the Bibliotheque bleue genre were the
Paracelsian lamens and receipts that the compiler of the Petit Albert had included.
Levi had great respect for old Theophrastus Bombatus von Hohenheim. He once
fell asleep over a copy of one of his works and experienced a vision of meeting
with him in his alchemical laboratory. On waking he rationalized the experience,
but this dream encounter with Paracelsus nevertheless left a strong and lasting
impression on him. 31

Levi hoped his writings on magic would combat and expose black magic and
diabolic grimoires, those 'unhappy aberrations of the human mind'. 32 As evidence
of their pernicious contents, he referred to the experiments on the occult power of
symbols by the mesmerist Jean Du Potet de Sennevoy (1 796-1 891). These

Rediscovering Ancient Magic | 177

involved exposing people to a series of lines and symbols, including circles, stars,
and serpent shapes, drawn on the floor in chalk and charcoal. Levi described them
as being analogous, 'if not absolutely identical, with pretended diabolical signa-
tures found in old editions of the Grand Grimoire'. 3 The idea was that certain
combinations of signs and lines exuded a magnetic influence over people, and
could even induce a profound sense of fear and cause the mind to conjure up
frightening visions. 34 For Levi the evil hold that malign grimoires could have over
the weak or unstable was brought home to him by his encounter with a young
priest who inquired of a bookseller where the master of magic lived. An appoint-
ment was arranged and the priest said he desired to obtain the Grimoire of Honorius
and would pay as much as one hundred francs for it. When Levi queried whether
he intended to practise forbidden black magic, the priest merely smiled sarcastic-
ally. It transpired later that the priest was Jean-Louis Verger, a troublesome and
mentally unstable young man who, in 1857, murdered the archbishop of Paris
during service. 35

Levi made two well-received visits to England in 1854 and 1856, where his
main contact was with the novelist, politician, and student of the occult Edward
Bulwer-Lytton (1803—73), whom later magic groups would falsely claim as a high
profile member.' 6 By i860 Levi's works had proven so influential that he was
receiving admiring visitors from abroad. One of them was the writer, magazine
editor, and mason Kenneth Mackenzie. His place in the history of modern
occultism is partly due to an account he published of his visit to Levi's home,
but primarily because of his early membership of the Societas Rosicruciana in
Anglia, which was founded in 1865 by its Supreme Magus, the Freemason Robert
Wentworth Little. 37 Other members were a London coroner named William
Wynn Westcott, who we shall meet again a little later, and Frederick Hockley
(1808—85). The latter was a last link with the turn-of-the-century London occult
network that circled around John Denley's bookshop. Hockley was at one time
employed by Denley, transcribing and compiling expensive and cheap grimoires
for sale, and his own collection of magical manuscripts was much coveted. 38

Another foreign traveller passing through the London occult scene around this
time was the African-American spiritualist Beverly Randolph (1825— 75). 39 Born
in the New York slums and brought up in an almshouse where his mother died,
he signed up as a cabin boy to escape life on the streets. Despite the challenges of
his miserable youth he managed to teach himself to read and write. He set himself
up as a barber in Utica and began to make a name for himself as an antislavery
orator and as a clairvoyant physician and spiritualist, adopting the title of 'Dr'.
Randolph visited England in 1855 and 1857, circulating amongst the feverish
spiritualist community but also, according to his own account, meeting Bulwer-
Lytton and the Rosicrucian writer Hargrave Jennings. There is no reason to doubt

178 I Rediscovering Ancient Magic

this. Bulwer-Lytton's fiction was certainly the inspiration for Randolph's own
attempts at writing Rosicrucian novels. There is also little doubt that his interest
in sex magic was stimulated by Jennings curious works on phallic-Buddhist
Rosicrucianism. 40

Randolph's life-long fascination with scrying and magic mirrors was also due to
his experiences in Paris and London. At the time, experimenting with contacting
the spirit world through crystal balls and magic mirrors was a major preoccupation
of mesmerists, spiritualists, and occultists. In the English occult scene instructions
on how to prepare and use magic mirrors were available in Barrett's The Magus.
Frederick Hockley had posed thousands of questions to the angels via his crystal,
and around the same time Richard James Morrison, better known as the author of
Zadkiel's Almanac, was also busy with his ball. In 1863 he took the bold step
of suing an admiral who had written a letter to the Daily Telegraph accusing him of
fraudulent pretences in his scrying sessions. Meanwhile in Paris, Randolph had
letters of introduction to meet Du Potet and another prominent spiritualist and
dabbler in magic mirrors Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet. Fanciful stories have circu-
lated about Randolph being initiated by Levi, but there is absolutely no evidence
for it. 41 It was the influence of Du Potet's and Cahagnet's experiments with
narcotics to induce trance states that led Randolph to become an enthusiastic user
of hashish, and at one time he was probably the biggest importer of the drug into
the United States. 42

Back in America, Randolph renounced spiritualism and entered the mystical
phase of his life. He set up the first Rosicrucian order in the USA, the Fraternitas
Rosae Cruris, espousing, teaching, and writing about magic mirrors, free love,
and the use of sex to reach magical enlightenment. For Randolph the ritualized use
of the orgasm could provide a gateway to the universal mystery of life, giving a
new meaning to the magic wand. He set sail once more for Africa and the Near
East in the early 1860s in order to complete his mystical enlightenment, though
details of his journey there are suspiciously sketchy, as were those of a previous
visit to the region in the 1 850s. Whatever the facts, it was certainly important to be
known to have made a pilgrimage to the pyramids, the home of Rosicrucianism.
'During my travels through Africa, Egypt, Turkey, Arabia, Syria, and my inter-
course with the Voudeaux of New Orleans and Long Island, I became thoroughly
convinced of the existence of two kinds of magic,' he wrote. 'One good and
beneficent, ruled and governed by the Adonim, the other foul, malevolent,
revengeful, lustful, and malignant.' 43

Randolph's significance in the story of grimoires lies in the interest he gener-
ated in ritual magic in America and the demand he might have created for books
of magic. Randolph certainly made money importing and selling magic mirrors
and it is not unlikely that he was involved in selling books other than his own.

Rediscovering Ancient Magic | 179

This was certainly the case with an occult group founded in the USA a few years
after Randolph's death that was influenced by the sex magic and mirror rituals he
taught. The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor was a mail order organization
founded in 1884 by Peter Davidson (1837— 1915), a Scottish violinmaker. 44
Davidson claimed the Brotherhood originated in Egypt long before the time of
Hermes Trismegistus, and stressed to initiates that it was a Western order as
distinct from the Eastern esotericism of the Theosophists. While living in the
Highlands of Scotland Davidson had maintained a regular correspondence with
the London occult scene, including members of the Societas Rosicruciana in
Anglia and Hargrave Jennings. It was this experience of postal fraternity that
gave him the idea that a mail order Order was feasible. After arriving in America
in 1886 to set up a Utopian community, he successfully continued to orchestrate
the running of the Brotherhood's predominantly British and French members.
The Utopian community never materialized though, and Davidson scraped a
living as a herbal doctor and supplier of magic mirrors, crystals, and books from
his home in Loudsville, Georgia. In a letter dated 1886 a prospective member of
the Brotherhood enquired of Davidson about purchasing a copy of Barrett's
Magus. Davidson replied that it was selling for ^1.55. 6d. He also said, 'I can get
you Agrippa's 4 Books if you wish. I have not them in stock just now; they are
rather difficult to be had now as they are getting very scarce.' 45

The Brotherhood's initial representative in England was the Revd William
Alexander Ayton, the vicar of Chacombe, Northamptonshire, who when
not carrying out his pastoral duties pursued his interest in Freemasonry and
Theosophy. 46 His consuming passion was alchemical experimentation, and he
whiled away many hours in his laboratory hidden away in his cellar under the
rectory. Ayton provides a neat link to the two men who more than anyone during
the Occult Revival opened up the secrets of the grimoires for an English readership
who could not access the German editions of Horst and Scheible. Ayton
conducted the marriage ceremony of the first of the two, Samuel Liddell Mathers
(1854-1918).

It was while living with his widowed mother in the seaside town of Bourne-
mouth that Mathers, the son of a Hackney merchant's clerk, befriended a neigh-
bour and Freemason named Frederick Holland. 47 His exploration of esotericism
began, and in 1882 the pair were admitted to the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia.
As his social circle widened the Hackney boy began to craft a new persona for
himself. His love of all things military nearly matched his fascination with the
occult. He joined a volunteer regiment and enthusiastically participated in crowd
control duties. More surprising was his adoption of the Scottish title Count
MacGregor of Glenstrae, bogusly claiming that Louis XV had bestowed it on an
ancestor after the Jacobite rebellion. After his mother's death in 1885 Mathers

180 | Rediscovering Ancient Magic

moved to London and it was there that he began to publish the first of his books
on occultism and magic. In 1888 he produced the Qabbalah Unveiled, a translation
of a seventeenth-century Latin treatise, and a book on the Tarot. The following
year he sealed his place in the history of grimoires by putting together the first
English print edition of the Key or Clavicule of Solomon.

As has already been noted in an earlier chapter, there were myriad versions of
manuscript grimoires bearing the title of the Clavicule of Solomon. Mathers was well
aware of this, mentioning that he had seen grimoires ascribed to Solomon which
were 'full of evil magic, and I cannot caution the practical student too strongly
against them.' So he pored over and transcribed passages from a number of mostly
seventeenth-century manuscripts in French, Hebrew, Latin, and English in the
British Library, filtering out the contaminating elements of diabolic magic and
constructing what he considered a pure version of the Clavicule. This would
encapsulate the wisdom of the ancients and serve as a companion to Levi's
theoretical construction of practical magic.

In 1890 Mathers was employed as curator of the then private Horniman
Museum, though today it is a fascinating public museum of cultural and natural
history. He obtained the position thanks to the influence of the occultist Annie
Horniman, the daughter of the museum's founder and benefactor. When, four
years later, Mathers and his French-born wife moved to Paris, Annie continued to
pay them an allowance, but when this ceased he eked out a living selling Turkish
Railway shares to supplement his income from writing. During his time in Paris he
consulted the grimoire collection of Rene de Voyer d'Argenson in the Bibliotheque
de V Arsenal and was particularly struck by one entitled the Book of the Sacred Magic
of Abra-Melin, which was written in a French hand of the late seventeenth or early
eighteenth century. It was quite possibly one of those confiscated by the Paris
police in their campaign against the magicians. Mathers explained in the preface to
his 1898 edition of the manuscript that he had been informed of its existence many
years earlier. He believed Bulwer-Lytton and Levi knew of it, but it was the poet
Paul Bois who urged him to immerse himself in its wisdom. 48

Like numerous other manuscript grimoires of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries it provided its own founding myth, telling how it was a translation from
the Hebrew script of a mage and celebrated Kaballist called Abra-Melin. Accord-
ing to the manuscript he was born in 1362 and had written down the secrets of his
magical knowledge in 1458 as a means of passing on the wisdom to his son.
During his life he had travelled far and wide in search of knowledge, performing at
the courts of European nobles, including that of the English King Henry VI,
eventually settled in Wurzburg. He was, then, an archetype of the Jewish
Renaissance mage. Mathers was ready to believe in this story and thus seal the
importance of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin as a profound work on the ascetic,

Rediscovering Ancient Magic | 181

spiritual basis of ancient Kaballistic magic largely free of the contamination and
meddling that had marred many of the versions of the Clavicule of Solomon. 49
Neither of Mathers' published grimoires made much money or circulated much
beyond the small circle of practising occultists in London and Paris. They were
produced in limited print runs and within a couple of decades they were running
at a high price in the second-hand book market.

Arthur Edward Waite (1857— 1942) was a more successful and widely appreci-
ated author. 50 Born in New York, the illegitimate son of a merchant marine who
drowned a year after his birth, Waite was taken to England by his mother,
an educated middle-class English woman, where he was brought up in north
London. His only formal education was two terms at St Charles's College in the
London suburb of Bayswater, which makes his later literary career all the more
impressive. Unlike most of the influential male occultists of the late Victorian
period his path to esotericism did not begin with Freemasonry. It was his
Catholicism and fascination with ritual that briefly led him to consider joining
the priesthood, and which subsequently, in the early 1880s, drew him to the work
of Blavatsky and through her to Levi, whose works he would later translate and
comment on critically for an English audience. His other love, poetry, was hardly
bringing in a living wage for his wife and young daughter so he turned to
churning out occult studies of varying quality. He did not even put his name to
the hackwork Handbook of Cartomancy. In contrast, his Devil Worship in France
(1896), an expose of supposed Satanists, was praised in the academic journal The
American Anthropologist as an 'invaluable' work for serious students of occultism
and mysticism. 51 His most unusual publishing venture was the translation of
various alchemical writings, including those of Paracelsus, which was financed
by the aristocratic alchemist Fitzherbert Edward Staflbrd-Jerningham (1833—
I 9 I 3)> who frittered away his family fortune in the deluded attempt to make
gold. 52 Looking back on this 'Hermetic adventure' Waite pondered, 'it can only
be regarded as a remarkable bibliographic fact that such texts were issued, and on
so great a scale, in the last decade of the nineteenth century.' 53

Waite's most successful venture was a Tarot pack published in 1910, but the
publication of most interest to us is his Book of Black Magic and of Pacts (1898). 54
This was the first major history and exposition of the whole genre of grimoires,
providing bibliographies and extracts from the range of works I have discussed so
far, such as the Arbatel, the Clavicules of Solomon, Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy,
the Grand grimoire, Book ofHonorius, and the Poule noire. Waite's motivation — apart
from money — was the same as the likes of Reginald Scot and Georg Conrad Horst
in that he set before readers a cornucopia of practical magic for the explicit
purpose of undermining it. Despite his occult interests Waite was no practical
magician, and his view on the subject is summoned up in his comment that 'the

182 I Rediscovering Ancient Magic

distinction between White and Black Magic is the distinction between the idle
and the evil word.' Waite was well aware, of course, that its contents would be of
huge interest to practical occultists and pointedly stated that he intended to
provide them with 'the fullest evidence of the futility of Ceremonial Magic as it
is found in books'. The conjurations and spells they contained were 'ridiculous',
'absurd', 'iniquitous' even — if 'it could be supposed that they were to be seriously
understood.' 55 No surprise then, that Waite made some withering comments
regarding Mathers' publications. Without naming him directly, he referred to the
editor of the Key of Solomon as 'an expositor of the more arid and unprofitable side
of Kabalistic doctrine'. He went on to demolish Mathers' view that the Sacred
Magic of Abra-Melin was copied from a Hebrew text or that it even originated any
earlier than the seventeenth century. I have to agree with him. 56

With its 170 woodblock engravings of lamens, talismans, signs, and seals, its
numerous transcriptions of conjurations, exorcisms, and prayers, the Book of Black
Magic and of Pacts constituted the richest, most comprehensive grimoire ever
produced in one printed volume. Waite stripped the great grimoires of their
philosophical and mystical content and provided a condensed manual of practical
ritual magic. Only 500 copies were printed initially, selling for the considerable
sum of ^2 25. Although Waite obviously hoped to make money from the book, it
was certainly not an exercise in popular publishing, though a new edition for the
cheaper price of 155. appeared in 1910 under the title The Book of Ceremonial Magic.

Considering their antipathy towards each other and their respective views on
magic, it may seem strange that Mathers and Waite were fellow members of the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which was the first nineteenth-century
occult organization explicitly dedicated to the practice of ritual magic. 57 Founded
in 1888, it had direct links with the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia and most of its
members had been immersed in the Theosophy movement. Following the
creation of the initial Isis-Urania Temple of the Golden Dawn in London,
regional branches were set up: the Osiris Temple in Weston-super-Mare, the
Horus Temple in Bradford, and the Amen-Ra Temple in Edinburgh. Their magic
was obviously not that of the cunning-folk who continued to provide magical
solutions for the misfortunes of the general populace of Britain at the time. The
Golden Dawn's magical philosophy was essentially another reformulation of early
modern Hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, and Kabbalah, particularly as viewed
through the lens of Levi's work. Added to this was a hierarchical structure
borrowed from Freemasonry and a ritual basis influenced by the old and new
Egyptology. The Golden Dawn never consisted of more than a few hundred
members at its peak, nearly all from the middle classes, but it was notable for
welcoming women and attracting members of the artistic community such as the
actress Florence Farr and the Irish poet and mystic W. B. Yeats.

Rediscovering Ancient Magic | 183

Mathers was largely responsible for creating the Golden Dawn's rituals, with
some initial input from his fellow founding member William Wynn Westcott,
who continued to be active in the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, becoming its
'Supreme Magus' in the 1890s. There was, of course, a foundation text with the
usual dubious history. In one version of its discovery this cipher manuscript was
found in a London bookshop just like Cagliastro happened upon his Egyptian
Masonic revelation. The alternative story is that it was owned by Frederick
Hockley. When he died in 1885 it was passed on with other papers to the
clergyman A. F. A. Woodford, another founder of the Golden Dawn. He, in
turn, handed it to Westcott who, recognizing the cipher as one described by
Trithemius, set about decoding it. It turned out to consist of five otherwise
unknown rituals of a Rosicrucian Freemasonic nature. It also contained the
address of one Anna Sprengel, a Rosicrucian adept in Nuremberg whose order
had a direct line of descent from the medieval brotherhood. Westcott wrote to her
and received her authorization to set up a Temple of the Golden Dawn. As can be
imagined, this account has been called into doubt. In fact, in 1900, Mathers wrote
a letter to Florence Farr stating that Westcott had forged both the cipher manu-
script and the correspondence with the mysterious Anna Sprengel. 58

As the rituals of the Golden Dawn developed, incorporating elements of John
Dee's system of magic, and to a lesser extent Mathers' grimoire publications,
Egyptian pagan influences also seeped in. 59 This is not surprising considering that
Mathers once described himself as 'a student of Occultism, Archaeology, and
Egyptology'. 60 By the 1890s the rolls of the Theban Magical Library and other
papyri had been published, and Lenormant's work on Chaldean magic texts was
widely known. Mathers referred to it in his introduction to the Sacred Magic of
Abra-Melin. So it is not surprising that along with the old Renaissance notions of
ancient Egypt that permeated Hermeticism and Rosicrucianism, the nineteenth-
century archaeological discoveries of actual Egyptian magic also influenced the
practices and rituals of the Golden Dawn. In 1896 Florence Farr produced a short
book entitled Egyptian Magic for which she consulted Goodwin's work on the
Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri, and mentioned in a letter that she had met with
an 'Egyptian Adept in the British Museum' which had opened up 'possibilities'.
Mathers also taught one of the invocations translated in Goodwin's article to other
members of the Order. 61

The numerous popular publications by Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge (1 8 57— 193 4)
were the most significant influence in exciting practical interest in Egyptian
magic. 62 Budge, who was possibly the 'Egyptian Adept' mentioned by Florence
Farr — though there is no evidence he was an occultist — began studying ancient
languages while a youthful employee at W. H. Smith's, and encouraged by the
keeper of oriental antiquities at the British Museum went on to study Semitic

184 I Rediscovering Ancient Magic

languages at Cambridge. On graduating he joined the Department of Oriental
Antiquities at the British Museum where he remained the rest of his working life.
He paid numerous short visits to Egypt, purchasing antiquities from local dealers
and a limited number through excavation. He was particularly successful, though
not always scrupulous, at collecting papyri and inscribed clay tablets from across
the Near and Middle East. Over his lifetime he wrote over a hundred mono-
graphs, the most well known of which were Egyptian Magic (1899) and the Book of
the Dead (1901). The latter, which developed from a facsimile of the Papyrus of Ani
published by the British Museum in 1890, was a funerary text consisting of a series
of prayers and rituals to guide the dead into the afterlife. Elements of it were
incorporated into the Golden Dawn's tenets. Its wider public reach was furthered
by reference to it in early-twentieth-century fantasy fiction, such as in Sax
Rohmer's Brood of the Witch-Queen (1918) and in the casebooks of Algernon
Blackwood's occult detective John Silence (1908). Budge's work is no longer
treated seriously by Egyptologists, though, as he wrote quickly and often without
appropriate scholarly caution or rigour. Numerous mistakes in translation and
interpretation littered his work. Nevertheless, with the expiry of the copyright on
his books, they are still probably the most widely disseminated and used works on
the subject today.

Much of the contents of the magical papyri were concerned with spells,
exorcisms, and conjurations for the usual practical ends, to heal the possessed,
protect against evil, provoke love, and cure the sick. The magic of Levi and the
Golden Dawn, like the Renaissance occult philosophers they revered, was con-
cerned with the much more lofty desire for spiritual enlightenment. So to make
use of the magical papyri it was necessary to incorporate them into a ritual
religious framework that transformed them from the practical into the mystical.
This was essentially a reversal of the process by which cunning-folk took the
rituals, symbols, and words of high magic and reformulated them into elements of
popular magic. It was this mutability of the contents of grimoires that ensured
their enduring relevance across different continents and eras.

In 1903 a long-brewing schism occurred in the Golden Dawn, brought about
primarily by Mathers' arrogance and erratic and dictatorial behaviour. Waite, by
now earning a living as a manager for the malted milk drink company Horlicks,
took over effective control of the London Temple, nudging the group's occult
philosophy and ceremonies away from ancient paganism and towards Christian
mysticism. One source of contention had been Mathers' support for a new and
rapidly rising member named Aleister Crowley, whose interest in magic had been
piqued by reading Waite's Book of Black Magic. 63 Crowley would go on to become
the most notorious magician of the twentieth century. A cruel, egotistical sex
magician who believed he was the reincarnation of Cagliostro and Levi, he was

Rediscovering Ancient Magic | 185

dubbed the 'wickedest man in the world' by the tabloid press, but died quietly and
alone in a Hastings boarding house in 1947 with less than a pound to his name.
The story of his rise and fall is a fascinating one, but his presence in the pages of this
book is due to an act of treachery. In 1904 relations between Crowley and his
patron had turned sour with Crowley suspecting that Mathers was using black
magic against him. In turn he consecrated talismans to protect himself. As an act of
revenge, he published under his own name a British Library manuscript, the
'Lemegeton; Clavicula Salomonis or the Little Key of Solomon', which consisted
of a list of spirits and their characters, that Mathers had transcribed. 64 A few years
later Crowley also published the rituals of the Golden Dawn in an occult journal
he had founded, despite Mathers' legal attempts to stop him. The 'secrets' of the
Golden Dawn were now out in the open, allowing later historians to piece
together the various old and new occult sources from which Mathers and
Westcott had stitched together the Order's ritual magic.

Writing for the people

Much of this chapter has been concerned with the world of, at the most, a few
thousand occultists across Europe and America. It could be argued that they
constitute a mere footnote in the story of grimoires. But while histories of the
Occult Revival focus almost exclusively on the esoteric philosophies, personal
relations, and internal tensions of the occultists, certain products of the Revival
reached far beyond the parlours of Paris and London and away from the esoteric
byways of the intellectual fringes of nineteenth-century Western society. One of
Peter Davidson's guides to the healing power of herbs and their mystical proper-
ties, Man Know Thyself (1878), was, for instance, used by folk healers in Trinidad.
Behold the Sign: Ancient Symbolism, a small book published by the Ancient Mystical
Order Rosa; Crucis (AMORC), founded in the USA in 191 5, was adopted by
some Obeah-men in Guyana. It contained hieroglyphs and symbols, such as a five-
pointed star 'held to be a talisman against witchcraft'. 65 In early-twentieth-century
Germany esoteric publishers pumped out cheap editions of the Sixth and Seventh
Books of Moses that found their way into the hands of many rural cunning-folk. It
was in France though, the home of the cheap print grimoire, that the occultists
were most attuned to a wider audience and the mundane magical needs of
the people. The most successful at tapping into this was Julien-Ernest Houssay
(1844-1912).

Abbe Julio, as Houssay was better known, was forced to leave the priesthood
after alienating himself from his superiors and being accused of fraud. 66 Freeing
himself from the ties of the Roman Catholic establishment he devoted his energies

INVOCATION

POUR DEMANDER L'INTERCESSION
DE L'ABBE JULIO
dans toutes les maladies physiques et morales

(Cette priere doit se reciter (want de se servir
des livres et pentacles de VAbbe Julio)

f Bienheureux Abbe Julio, zele et fidele ser-
viteur de Jesus-Christ, vous qui avez tant gueri
et soulage tous ceux qui venaient vous en prier ;
vous qui avez promis d'accorder votre puissante
intercession a ceux qui vous imploreraient avec
confiance, secourez-nous.

f Bienheureux Abbe Julio, priez Dieu, nous
vous en supplions, pour qu'il nous accorde notre
demande, nous vous le demandons avec con-
fiance.

Becevez, 6 Dieu infiniment bon, les suppliques
que nous vous adressons par l'entremise de
l'Abbe Julio, nous vous implorons par votre
Fils Unique qui vit et regne avec le Saint-Esprit
en l'unite d'un seul Dieu. Ainsi soit-il.

Fig. 16 A prayer to recite before reading the books or using the pentacles of Abbe Julio. A single
sheet sold separately from his books.

Rediscovering Ancient Magic | 187

to various popular Catholic publishing enterprises. His immersion in the occult
side of religion seems to have been inspired by his relationship with a well-known
faith healer named Jean Sempe. It was partly on the basis of the latter's reputation
that Abbe Julio founded his own. He was also profoundly influenced by his
discovery of a seventeenth-century book of blessings in which he found all the
'curious exorcisms, ignored by the modern Church', which he subsequently
incorporated into his various publications. 67 Although Houssay was apparently
never a member of any occult group, there is no doubt he was influenced by the
activities and writings of the second generation of French fm-de-siecle occultists
who followed in Levi's footsteps.

As we saw earlier, Mathers was living in Paris during the 1890s and was
attracting considerable attention with his series of public ritual dramas called the
Rites of Isis, starring his wife, Mina, in Egyptian dress. But the main focus of
Parisian magical activity was Gerard Encausse (1865-1916), better known as
Papus. 68 Born in Spain to a Spanish mother and a French father, he was brought
up in Paris where, while studying for a qualification in medicine, he began to
immerse himself in the literature of alchemy, Kabbalah, and Hermeticism housed
in the National Library. The works of Levi were no doubt his first occult port of
call. In January 1 886, he wrote an admiring letter to the old master not realizing he
had been dead for more than a decade. 6 A year later he presented a paper at a
conference on French Occultism which generated mixed reviews, with one
requesting that he give up public speaking. 70 He signed up for the Theosophical
Society, though he left not long after, put off by its Eastern mysticism. Instead he
founded the Christian mystic Martinist order and an Independent Esoteric Study
Group. He also joined the Cabalistic Order of the Rosy Cross, set up by his friend,
fellow Levite, and shining light in the Parisian occult scene, Stanislaus de Guaita.
Both Papus and de Guaita were at the centre of lurid claims in the mid-i890s that
France was under threat by an outbreak of Satanism inspired by Freemasons and
occultists with Encausse being denounced as 'the demon Papus'. The accusations
were spread through a series of articles written by Leo Taxil, a scurrilous anti-
clerical writer who converted to Catholicism and who, to prove his new-found
dedication to the Church, launched a campaign against Freemasonry. A. E. Wake
investigated the whole affair in his book Devil Worship in France? 1

Papus was a prolific author on occultism and alternative medicine, but the
book that had a significant influence on the wider world of popular magic was his
Traite methodique de magie pratique, first published in 1 898. It was heavily influenced
by Levi but contained so much information on practical magic that parts of it
resembled a grimoire, and it was probably used as such by some French cunning-
folk. Numerous talismans, characters, and prayers were provided, along with
advice on such familiar grimoire topics as how to render oneself invisible and

188 | Rediscovering Ancient Magic

deal with witchcraft, all offered without the scathing critical tone of Waite's
Book of Black Magic and of Pacts.

Abbe Julio, who was more rooted in the provincial religious culture of healing
and magic than the urbanite Papus, innovated by stripping out the esoteric and
philosophical content of such nineteenth-century occult works and providing
practical help under the auspices of Catholic piety. So, in 1896, four years after
Jean Sempe's death, Abbe Julio published a book of the healer's miraculous
prayers entitled Prieres Merveilleuses pour la guerison de toutes les Malades Phisiques et
Morales (Marvellous prayers for healing all physical and moral illnesses). Other works
soon followed on the back of this success. Les veritables pentacles etpriers contained a
series of talismans to be employed against evil spirits, witchcraft, and ill health,
while Le livre des grand exorcismes et benedictions provided exactly what it says, a
series of exorcisms and blessings — but for the laity rather than the clergy. The Julio
oeuvre would not have been out of place amongst the old Bibliotheque bleue
grimoires. As we saw in the previous chapter, the Catholic Church in France
was quite successful in demonizing the Petit Albert and its ilk. So for those fearful of
the old popular grimoires the 'Catholic' works of Abbe Julio provided protection
from misfortune, evil spirits, and ill health but under the label of 'religion' rather
than 'magic'. In this sense they echoed the reception and popularity of exorcism
manuals during the early modern period. No wonder, then, that like the Petit
Albert, they were quickly assimilated into the cultures of popular magic both at
home and abroad. Abbe Julio's books were adopted by quimboiseurs in Martinique
and the gadedzafe healers of the French Antilles. 72 One man interviewed in the
1980s recalled a Guadeloupe sorcerer who 'used books like the books of spells of
Abbe Julio'. The Julio spell book was described as 'terrible' in the sense that it was
dangerous to use, for if one read it at the wrong time and without properly
understanding the words the angels would come and destroy you. 73

The greatest popularizer of grimoires to emerge from the Occult Revival was,
however, to be found across the Atlantic. Through the publishing activities of the
American book pirate William Lauron DeLaurence, the occultist of the High
Seas, the works of Waite and Mathers, and that of many others, travelled far
beyond the claustrophobic occult circles of France and Britain. They would find
an unimagined readership amongst African-Americans and the folk healers and
magical practitioners of the Caribbean and West Africa. So it is to America we
must now return to find out how this came about.

Grimoires USA

The production of grimoires was an entrepreneurial enterprise that thrived
wherever the influence of secular and ecclesiastical censors was restricted by
geographical, educational, or political factors. The opening up of America created
just such an environment, and hucksters, quacks, astrologers, fortune-tellers, and
occult practitioners of all shades thrived. It is in America that grimoire authorship
becomes a history of real if slippery personalities, whose success was tied to the
immigrant experience and the unique opportunities and social mobility that
opened up for those who were not enslaved or hindered by racial prejudice.
A door-to-door salesman from Ohio named William Delaurence would emerge
from this entrepreneurial world to become a transatlantic sensation — as we shall
see later.

The newspaper was a crucial facilitator in the development of the huge
free market for occult services, both nationally and internationally. One late-
nineteenth-century folklorist, Henry Carrington Bolton, attempted to trace the
advancement of American society and consequent decline of 'superstition'
through studying the advertising pages of the press. Writing in 1895 he observed:

These advertisements used to be far more numerous in the daily papers of
our Eastern cities than at present, and their decrease in number probably
denotes increase in intelligence; on the other hand, San Francisco news-
papers are especially rich in these curiosities of literature, a fact indicating
that superstition goes hand-in-hand with the adventurous spirit of the
rough characters who first settle in newly-opened lands. 1

190 | Grimoires USA

With hindsight we know that Harrington was way off the mark. It was the cities
of the eastern half of the country that would, in the next few decades, become the
generators of numerous occult organizations and magical publications, with far-
reaching consequences. One reason for this was the development of African-
American consumerism.

The first surviving occult book possibly written by, and perhaps for an African-
American readership, was The Complete Fortune Teller and Dream Book by 'Chloe
Russel, a Woman of Colour, in the State of Massachusetts', published in 1824.
Russel's introductory account of her harrowing life tells that she was born three
hundred miles southwest of Sierra Leone around 1745 and enslaved at the age of 9.
She and her brother were bound with ropes by white men, whipped, and dragged
miles through the bush and bundled unto a ship bound for Virginia. Cruelly
treated by her master she determined to kill herself but her father appeared to her
in a dream to persuade her not to. Her prophetic powers developed through such
dreams and word of her abilities spread. People began to consult her about lost
property and she accrued the name the 'Black Interpreter'. It was her success at
divining the whereabouts of a treasure for a plantation owner that led him to buy
her freedom. There was a Chloe Russel in Massachusetts at the time and it is quite
possible that she was the real author. As to its divinatory content, it was a run-of-
the mill chapbook with much of its advice on palmistry, the signification of moles,
and rituals for obtaining husbands, culled from other such publications. It was only
towards the end of the century that there developed an identifiable African-
American market for cheap fortune-telling booklets, such as Aunt Sally's Policy
Player's Dream Book 2 As its title suggests it was aimed primarily at petty gamblers,
like most such publications at the time.

There was nothing distinctively African-American about the divinatory
methods explained in these books, and nothing of practical magic. Yet African-
Americans in the southern states had a well-defined and widely practised magical
tradition waiting to be tapped commercially — hoodoo. The use of the term was
first recorded in the 1880s, and although it is sometimes used as a synonym for
Voodoo they were two distinct traditions. Hoodoo lacked the organized aspects
and religious framework of Haitian Voodoo, which in the USA was largely
restricted to New Orleans and was in terminal decline by the late nineteenth
century. 3 Hoodoo doctors, also known as 'conjure doctors' and 'root-workers',
practised a mix of herbal medicine, charms, magic, and prayers, and it was the
Bible rather than the pantheon of Yoruba divinities that underpinned their
efficacy. The first cheap grimoire to exploit the hoodoo tradition was The Life
and Works of Marie Laveau, published in the early twentieth century. It sold on the
basis of the legendary exploits of a New Orleans Voodoo priestess of that name.
Detailed research has shown that Marie Laveau was a real person, but her portrayal

Grimoires USA | 191

in fiction and folklore as an inspirational Voodoo leader of New Orleans' African-
American community is far from the mark. Her practice was hoodoo not Voodoo. 4
This was at least reflected in the contents of a copy of The Life and Works
advertised for sale by a New Orleans drugstore owner. Reports of his prosecution
in 1927 describe a mail order catalogue he issued that itemized some 250 charms,
as well as The Life and Works, which contained 'instructions for the use of charms
to win husbands, cause bad luck to befall a neighbor, and prevent others from
working evil'. 5 The Life and Works does not seem to have circulated widely
beyond Louisiana and neighbouring states. This is not surprising really for in the
north there was already a long-established grimoire industry born out of the pow
wow magical tradition of the ethnic Germans of Pennsylvania.

'Pow wow' obviously does not sound Germanic. It is thought to be a corruption
of an Algonquin Native American word, and was recorded in early-seventeenth-
century English publications on New England to describe the native medicine men
who were said to conjure up the Devil and practise 'exorcismes and necromanticke
charmes'. ' By the nineteenth century it had, by an intriguing process of cultural
osmosis, come to define the magical healing tradition of the Pennsylvanian
Germans, which was otherwise known in local dialect as brauche or braucherei. 7
As one might expect from the descendants of the Pietist communities of the
eighteenth century, pow wow doctors and their clients viewed healing as a
Christian gift bestowed on a select few. Andrew C. Lenhart, a well-known
practitioner in York, Pennsylvania, during the early twentieth century, explained,
'Some men have power. I have it. Power is given some men as a talent, just as Jesus
gave power to his apostles.' As a prominent unlicensed healer Lenhart was well
known to the state board of medical licensure, but he was never arrested for
practising medicine illegally. 8 While pow wow doctors were important figures,
the fundamental Protestant belief in a personal relationship with God also gener-
ated a strong self-help culture of medicine and protection in Pennsylvanian
Germans. Books of simple Christian charms and prayers consequently proved
popular. One in particular came to dominate the market — the Long Lost Friend.
'Anybody could use the book,' explained one woman. 'You had to have a little
faith, you know, you would have to believe in God.' 9

Friends reunited

The first American-printed charm book produced for the ethnic German market
was Der Freund in der Noth; oder, Geheime Sympathetische Wissenschaft. This was a small
twenty-four page collection of medical receipts and magical charms to stop thieves,
charm guns, and the like. It traded on the success of a non-occult 'book of useful

192 I Grimoires USA

information' for the benefit of farmers called Der Freund in der Noth, which was
published in Germantown in 1793. The preface to the magical Der Freund provided a
typically hoary tale of a mythical foreign book filled with hidden knowledge:

The following secret remedies were taken from an old Spanish manu-
script, which was found at an old hermit's who for over a hundred years
had lived in a cave in the dark valleys of the Graubiinden land, perform-
ing in the same region many wondrous works, among others totally
expelling from said regions the monstrous dragon with four young,
which dwelt upon those fearsome mountains in Unterwalden. 10

The charm book that rose to greatest cultural prominence in the region was
another 'friend' — Der lang verborgene Freund, first published in Reading, Pennsyl-
vania, in 1820. It generously contained 'true and Christian instructions for
everyone', and its altruistic author and publisher was John George Hohman.
Along with his wife and son, Hohman, a Roman Catholic unlike most of
his fellow German emigrants, sailed from Hamburg in 1802 and arrived in
Philadelphia in October that year. Like many such immigrants they began their
new life as indentured servants to pay for their passage. The Hohmans settled in
Alsace Township, Berks County, and John soon began to earn extra income by
publishing and peddling German broadside ballads. In 181 1 he published the first
known Himmelsbrief or Celestial Letter in America, claiming it was a copy of one he
brought with him from Europe. He later expanded his publishing business,
producing a series of occult, religious, and medical tracts for the ethnic German
population, including a version of that European chapbook classic, the Wandering
Jew, a book of New Testament apocrypha, and a collection of hymns. 11 It would
seem that Hohman also practised as a healer, publishing twelve testimonials from
satisfied patients. Among them was an account of his successful cure, in 1817, of a
wheal in the eye that afflicted the son of Benjamin Stoudt, a Lutheran school-
master, and also his treatment of Landlin Gottwald, of Reading, who suffered from
a painful arm. It was, though, the enduring influence of Der lang verborgene Freund
that has led the leading expert on Pennsylvanian folk culture to describe Hohman
as one of 'the most influential and yet most elusive figures in Pennsylvania
German history'. 12

Demand led to several German language editions appearing over the next
couple of decades, which were joined in 1842 with the first American printing
of Egyptische Geheimnisse. Hohman's place in wider American history was sealed
when English versions began to appear. 13 It would seem that the first awkward
English translation of 1846, The Long Secreted Friend, was one of Hohman's very
last publishing enterprises. It is now extremely rare, with a copy recently being
offered for sale for $5,000. There was a more fluent, anonymous translation,

THE

LONG LOST FBMfl.

A COLLECTION

OF

M S8TERIOU8 & INVALUABLE

ARTS & REMEDIES,

FOB

MAN AS WELL AS ANIMALS.

WITH MANY PROOFS

Of their yirtue and efficacy inhealing diseases, &c, the greater
p«rt of which was never published until they
appeared in print for the first time in
the U. 8. in the year 1820.

BY JOHN GEORGE HOHMAN.

2^=

HARRISBURG, PA. — 1 868.
T. F. Scheffcr, Primer.

17 Title page of John George Hohman's The Long Lost Friend

194 I Grimoires USA

published in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1856, presumably after Hohman's
death, which sealed its fortune and the Hohman legend. Another independently
translated version, The Long Hidden Friend, which contained some small variation
in content, was published in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1863. 4 Both English
editions spawned further reprints, but it was the Harrisburg edition that became
ubiquitous through numerous pulp editions produced during the early twentieth
century under the title John George Hohman's Pow-Wows.

Hohman was refreshingly outspoken, tackling potential critics head on. He said
he would have

preferred writing no preface whatever to this little book, were it not
indispensably necessary, in order to meet the erroneous views some men
entertain in regard to works of this character. The majority, undoubtedly,
approve of the publication and sale of such books, yet some are always
found who will persist in denouncing them as something wrong. 15

He went on to point out that he sold his books 'publicly, and not secretly, as other
mystical works are sold', and drew on his European experience when expressing
his appreciating that 'useful' and 'morally right' books were 'not prohibited in the
United States, as is the case in other countries where kings and despots hold
tyrannical sway'. 16 For Hohman, God would not have revealed 'sympathetic
words' if he had not meant them to be used for the good of the people. He was
dismissive of the vain conceits of the medical profession, stating 'whatever cannot
be cured by sympathetic words, can much less be cured by any doctor's craft or

,17

cunning.

As to the nature of Hohman's 'sympathetic words', many of them were simple
healing charms for natural ailments in the tradition of those contained in French
Bibliotheque bleue grimoires and Medicin des Pauvres. In fact, much of Hohman's
corpus was taken directly from the Romanusbuchlein, which as we saw in Chapter 4
had first appeared in Germany in the 1780s. Hohman could have brought a copy
with him, though no doubt some already circulated in America. Some of the
charms were short adjurations, such as a remedy for the colic:

I warn ye, ye colic fiends! There is one sitting in judgement, who
speaketh: just or unjust. Therefore beware, ye come colic fiends! 18

Others belonged to the European genre of apocryphal biblical charms. A previous
owner of my own 1856 edition of Long Lost Friend pencilled the words 'very good'
next to this charm 'For the Scurvy and Sore Throat':

Speak the following, and it will certainly help you: Job went through the
land, holding his staff close in the hand, when God the Lord did meet

Grimoires USA | 195

him, and said to him: Job, what art thou grieved at? Job said: Oh God,
why should I not be sad? My throat and my mouth are rotting away.
Then said the Lord to Job: In yonder valley there is a well, which will
cure thee, (name), and thy mouth, and thy throat, in the name of God the
Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

This must be spoken three times in the morning, and three times in the
evening; and where it reads 'which will cure,' you must blow three times
in the child's mouth. 1 5

The book ventured into grimoire territory with several spells against thieving
and witchcraft. It also contained instructions for conjurations, such as that 'To
make a Wand for searching for Iron, Ore, or Water'. A twig of one year's growth
broken from a tree on the first night of Christmas was to be struck against the
ground while the operator said: 'Archangel Gabriel, I conjure thee in the name
of God, the Almighty, to tell me, is there any water [iron, ore] here or not? Do
tell me!' 20

People purchased the Long Lost Friend not only for its contents but also for its
inherent protective power. Indeed, Hohman was commercially savvy to make this
explicit, stating prior to the preface: 'Whoever carries this book with him, is safe
from all his enemies, visible or invisible; and whoever has this book with him
cannot die without the holy corpse of Jesus Christ nor drowned in any water, nor
burn up in any fire, nor can any unjust sentence be passed upon him. So help me.'
In 1928 an African-American named Charles D. Lewis explained that he had
carried the book with him for sixteen years and consequently no accident had
befallen him all that time. He had an adventurous and dangerous life working as a
fireman on steamships. During the First World War the White Star liner on which
he worked was requisitioned by the British Admiralty while sailing near Suez.
Soon after losing his trusty copy he suffered an accident. He purchased another,
and avowed that he never employed its contents to play the pow wow doctor. 21

By the early twentieth century numerous further editions of the Long Lost
Friend, some under the title Pow- Wows, had ensured that it was firmly cemented in
the medical tradition of ethnic Germans. The extent of its influence in Pennsyl-
vania was revealed during an investigation by the Berks County Medical Society
into the practices of pow wow doctors in the region. In 1904 it was reported that
the Society had found that it was 'almost exclusively used by the witch-doctors in
preparing their charms and in giving advice'. 22 Their concerns about its use were
periodically born out over the next few decades. In 195 1 a Mennonite couple
from Ephrata were reported to the police after they refused to have their seriously
injured child treated by 'scientific' medicine. The couple had been ejected from
the Mennonite Church 'for faith healing beliefs stemming from a book by John

REMEDIED .

To Win every Game one engages in.

i the ''eart of a bat with a red silken string to the right
and you will win every game at cards yon play.

Against Burnt.

Our dear Lord Jesus Christ going on a journey, saw a fire-
brand burning: it was Saint Lorenzo stretched out on a roast
He rendered him assistance and consolation ; he lifted his di
rine hand, and blessed the brand ; he stopped it from spread-
; deeper and wider Thus may the burning be blessed in
» ft God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Amen

Another Remedy for Burns.

out brand, but never in ; be thou cold or hot, thou
ase to burn. May God guard thy blood and thy flesh,

thy marrow and thy bones, and every artery great or small

▼y all shall be guarded and protected in the name of God,
against inflammation and mortification, in the name of God ihe
tfathw. the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen .

To be given to Cattle, against Witchoraft

8 A T O B

A & E P O

TENET

3 P E R A

it O T A S

This must be written on paper and the cattle made to awal
- it in thefr feed.

How to tie up and heal Wounds.
Speak tha following : " This wound I tie up in three names,
in order that thou maycst take from it, heat, water, falling off
i>f the flesh, swelling, and all that may be injurious about the
swelling, in the name of the Holy Trinity."— This must b*
spoken three times; then draw a string three times around the
wound, and put it under the corner of the house toward the
1 lay: "I put thee there, f t f in order that thoi

Fig. i8 Charms in John George Hohman's The Long Lost Friend.

Grimoires USA | 197

G. Hohman, "The Long Lost Friend" '. The father told the state troopers who
took the boy to hospital, 'If the Lord wants to heal the boy, He will heal him.' 23
In a letter written to the press in 1904 a Lutheran Minister suggested that its
influence extended beyond Pennsylvania, 'possibly the larger portion of the country
east of the Mississippi, and possibly even beyond.' 24 Folklorists have revealed that its
influence extended to the 'Cajun in Louisiana, the hill man in the Ozarks, and other
groups'. 25 In the 1930s an anthropologist researching African-American culture in a
Mississippi cotton town interviewed the most reputed 'conjure-doctor' in the area,
who also received letters from white and black clients from Louisiana and as far as
Oklahoma. Unlike some of his local competitors the 'doctor' did not claim religious
inspiration or innate healing powers, but relied totally on his herb and magic
books. 26 He was a man of little education, but like many a cunning-man in centuries
past, he set great store by his display of book knowledge, being the proud owner of a
six-foot shelf of large encyclopedias. His magical prowess depended on a copy of
Pow- Wows and a copy of Albertus Magnus, or Egyptian Secrets, which was also
published in cheap paperback form during the 1930s. When someone once offered
to buy his Pow-Wows, 'he at first refused for fear the white purchaser would use it in
the service of the Devil, instead of for God and Christ.' Several decades later the
owner of a Chicago candle shop, a place where the accoutrements of folk magic and
medicine could be bought, recommended that along with the Bible the only two
medical books that were required to stay healthy were the Farmer's Almanac and
Hohman's Pow- Wows 21

Roback the wizard

The Long Secreted Friend may have been the first English language grimoire to be
published in the USA, but the first to boldly declare its contents as providing
'magical' wisdom appeared a few years later. In the 1840s another north European
followed in Hohman's footsteps and boarded a ship at Hamburg with a prodigious
occult career in America waiting. He was the astrologer, quack doctor, and
purported seventh son Charles W. Roback, the self-styled 'President of the
Astrological College of Sweden, and Founder of the Society of the Magi in
London, Paris, and St. Petersburg'. These impressive-sounding institutions were
the inventions of an inveterate liar.

Roback was born Carl Johan Nilsson in the village of Fallebo, Smaland, in
southern Sweden, on 22 November 181 1. 28 He first worked as a farm hand, but
in his late twenties he moved to the nearest town in the area Doderhultsvik,
now part of Oskarshamn, where he ran a general store selling coffee, sugar,
soap, and other staples. By this time he had changed his surname to the more

198 I Grimoires USA

impressive-sounding Fallenius and married a woman named Greta Cajsa. In 1843,
however, he abandoned his family and set sail for America. The fact that he
had been caught out perpetrating a series of petty frauds, including signing
a promissory note using a false name, just might have had something do with
his desertion.

Roback's humble and inglorious life before arriving in America is in stark
contrast with his own autobiographical account, which tells a far more noble
and extraordinary story. The Robacks were a family renowned from Viking times,
he claimed, and his ancestral home was a castle near Falsters, surrounded by rocks
and 'tall spectral firs'. His childhood was one of great privilege and reverence. Five
of his brothers were 'courted, caressed, and helped forward by powerful friends in
their careers'. It was around the age often that one of them, Frithiof, disclosed to
Charles his occult heritage as they talked in a vast apartment in the castle hung
with axes and spears: 'He informed me that our race had been renowned for their
prophetic gifts, and their skill and attainments in Magic, Astrology, and other
occult lore, for more than four hundred years.' Frithiof revealed to Charles that
these hereditary powers were rendered more potent in him by being the seventh
son of a seventh son. At the age of fourteen Charles applied himself to the study of
'every species of Magic' and then for many years he travelled across Europe, Asia,
and Africa perfecting his knowledge of the magical sciences. 'It would occupy too
much space, and might seem like egotism,' he said modestly, 'to recount the
honors that were paid to me at the various capitals of Europe.' Naturally bored
with his celebrity and the adulation he received, and 'longing for a less artificial
state of society than that in which I had lately moved, I now determined to visit
that land of the frank and the free — the United States.' 30

The only passage of his autobiography that has any truth in it is his account of
his vaunted success in the land of the frank and the free. He landed in America on
the 14 June 1844 and over the next nine years resided in Baltimore, Philadelphia,
New York, and Boston. This itinerary is partly confirmed by Roback's most
ardent critic, Thomas Hague, a disgruntled Philadelphian astrologist who styled
himself the 'United States Astrologer'. He claimed to be the first American to
write or publish a line on the subject of astrology. He had certainly been
publishing a range of astrological almanacs since 1838, including the long-running
monthly United States' Horoscope. 31 But Hague was no stranger to puffery and
untruths. In the November 1851 edition he boldly stated that 'Even the incum-
bent of the highest office in the United States, as well as their cabinets and
senators, has honoured it by a perusal: and why? Truly it is, they have adopted
the Astrologer's system, in his search of truth.' 32 Hague denounced Roback as a
vile impostor and a corrupting social influence. On a personal level, he was
incensed to find that Roback

Grimoires USA | 199

on first coming before the people as an Astrologer, paid several heavy
sums of money for judgements on nativities, which had been given by
me, — and I have in my possession two purporting to have been written
by him, which are almost verbatim copies of those obtained of me, a
beautiful commentary upon his Astrological abilities!!! 33

In 1 85 1 Hague decided to pour 'heavy metal' on his rival in the form of a
coruscating pamphlet, Exposition of C. W. Roback, which included letters on the
matter addressed to William F. Johnston, Governor of Pennsylvania, and Charles
Gilpin, Mayor of Philadelphia. 34 According to Hague, Roback's first occupation
in America was running a grog shop in Baltimore, where he passed himself of as
William Williams, alias Billy the Swede or Dutch Bill. Around 1847 he was
obliged to decamp and pitched up in Philadelphia where he spent some months
in the city hospital. Once back on the streets Roback made a brief living charging
the curious two cents a peek to see a small alligator he kept in a tin box, which he
claimed was a crocodile he had caught during his travels in Africa. He raised
enough money to rent an office on South Eight Street, setting himself up as a
cunning-man, curing the sick, detecting stolen goods, offering to cast out Devils,
and practising 'Geotic Magic'. He now discovered the power of the burgeoning
American press and began to pepper the local newspapers with puffs. One such
advertisement published in 1850 consisted of a testimonial from a Jane Carney,
said to live three miles below Wilmington. She recounted how, frustrated by her
lover's timidity in proposing marriage, she had consulted Roback. He successfully
used his magic to induce the man to get betrothed, and performed the further
service of recovering the sum of $10 stolen from her by a servant. 35

Hague tells of Roback's next bold move into the quack medicine business in
Philadelphia. Noticing the popularity of a local brand of German Bitters produced
by Dr C. M. Jackson, Roback got together with a local German druggist to
produce his own version of the panacea — Hufeland's Bitters, named after the
renowned German physician Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland (1762— 1836), who
had been the admired doctor of Goethe and the King of Prussia. Hufeland's name
was well known across Europe, due in part to the popularity of his book The Art of
Prolonging Life, which was published in several languages. The great doctor's
reputation would certainly have been known to many German settlers in Penn-
sylvania during the mid-nineteenth century, and in 1829 a translation of his
Treatise on the Scrofulous Disease had been published in Philadelphia. Rather
disingenuously, Hague does not mention that Jackson also played on the same
association, calling his product Dr Hoofland's German Bitters. Roback went one
audacious step further in his publicity campaign though. He employed an associ-
ate to pass himself of as the grandson of the great Hufeland newly arrived from

200 | Grimoires USA

Berlin. This impostor would prescribe Roback's bitters and then refer his patients
to the conjuror.

For reasons unknown, but presumably related to legal heat generated by
Hague's expose, in 1852 we find that Roback had removed to No. 6 White
Street, New York. Once again, with his irrepressible entrepreneurial flair, he
began to build his occult business through a series of advertisements in the local
press. One example took the form of a 'Lecture on Astrology and Magic' in which
he stated, 'Things which appear incredible to the skeptic and are scoffed at by the
shallow smatterers in science, are admitted by the candid and the reflecting when
the evidence is of a character so overwhelming and positive that to question it is to
doubt all history'. 36 Another puff, which boasted of his many prophetic successes
in Europe and the United States, also asserted that he could cure diseases con-
sidered incurable by the rest of the medical profession. For those who came to his
office he offered to 'make no charge, except for the conjurations he shall make use
of. He also advertised his 'power for the restoration of stolen or lost property,
which he has used for the advantage of thousands in this City and elsewhere'. 37
Another advertisement eulogized 'Roback the Oracle' in verse, concluding with
the boast that he had 'assisted thousands of the world's weary wanderers with
profitable advice, bringing them out of the shadows of despondency'." 8 One of his
most sophisticated puffs, devised during a sojourn in Boston in 1 853 , was disguised
as a news item. It described how a band of around 200 Swedish immigrants had
just arrived in Boston, and remarked that 'while passing the residence of Prof W.
C. Roback, the noted Astrologer, in High-street, the Swedes honoured the

Professor with three hearty cheers ... as a testimonial of respect to their coun-

,39

tryman.

Such was Roback's success at exploiting the burgeoning American newspapers
that his rise to national notoriety was swift. A book on The Philosophy of Human
Nature, published in 1851, mentioned him in passing as a quack and conjuror
noteworthy for his skill at playing on public stupidity. 40 The following year
Charles Wyllys Elliott reprinted one of Roback's advertisements in his book on
the supernatural to show that the 'mystical profession is not exploded'. 'Can it be
possible', he mocked, 'that there is any prospect of their endowing a professorship
in Yale College?' 41 By i860 Roback was the most well-known occultist in
America. He received his own entry, 'Roback the Wizard', in Lambert Wilmer's
coruscating attack on the role of the newspapers in promoting bunkum and
exploiting credulity, published in 18 59. 42 Another book published in the same
year entitled Humbug, which sought to expose popular impositions, also singled
him out. 'Who does not remember "Prof. Roback," "the seventh son of a seventh
son," who sent you those "Astrological Almanacks," and who is a swindling
humbug of the most barefaced character.' 43 It is possible that it was such national

Grimoires USA | 201

press coverage of Roback's notoriety that provoked the Pennsylvania General
Assembly to introduce a statute against fortune-telling in 1861.

The laws against magic and divination were patchy. In the 1840s the
Massachusetts Penal Code included the prohibition of 'Any person who, by
palmistry, cards or otherwise, for gain, tells or pretends to tell fortunes, or predicts
or pretends to predict future events, or who practises as a profession, trade or
occupation the discovering, or pretending to discover to others, for gain, where
things lost or stolen are to be found.' 44 However, at the same period, no such law
had been instituted in Pennsylvania — as Roback was apparently aware. According
to Hague, a sympathetic city alderman had reassured Roback that there was no
state statute that applied specifically to his magical and divinatory services. The
lack of one was highlighted during Roback's prosecution for fraudulent pretences
before the Philadelphia quarter sessions in February 1850. Mary Meehan, perhaps
having read the testimonial of Jane Carney, had paid Roback $3 on the under-
standing that he would, by his conjurations, force a thief to return some clothes
that had been stolen from her. The jury found him guilty but Judge King cast
doubt on the law of false pretences being appropriate in such a case. 'In England',
he observed, 'there was a special statute in relation to cheating by these means
[1824 Vagrancy Act], and he thought that it would be well for our Legislature to
make an enactment on the subject.' 45 According to Hague, he had been sued
several times for false pretences, but had the charges dropped through bribery and
by paying off witnesses and buying false ones. 46 It was not until a decade later that
the Pennsylvania General Assembly instituted an 'Act for the Suppression of
Fortune Telling', which went far beyond the British Vagrancy Act which inspired
it. 47 It was directed against:

any person who shall pretend, for gain or lucre, to predict future events,
by cards, tokens, the inspection of the head or hands of any person, or by
any one's age, or by consulting the movement of the heavenly bodies; or
who shall, for gain or lucre, pretend to effect any purpose by spells,
charms, necromancy or incantation.

It also covered those

Who shall pretend, for lucre or gain, to enable any one to get or to
recover stolen property, or to tell where lost articles or animals are, or to
stop bad luck, or to give good luck, or to put bad luck on any person or
animals, or to stop or injure the business of any person, or to injure the
health of any person, or to shorten the life of any person, or to give
success in business, enterprise, speculation, lottery, lottery numbers or
games of chance, or win the affections of any person, or to give success in

202 | Grimoires USA

business, enterprise, speculation, lottery, lottery numbers or games of
chance, or win the affections of any person whatever for marriage or
seduction, or to make one person marry another, or to induce any person
to alter or make a will in favor or against any one, or to tell the place
where treasure, property, money or valuables are hid, or to tell the places
where to dig or to search for gold, metals, hidden treasure.

This was an unusually detailed statute in that it pretty much covered every aspect
of magical practice, presumably with the intention of leaving as few legal ambi-
guities as possible.

It was while in Boston that Roback branched out into the publishing world,
first producing Roback's Astrological Almanac, and Dr C. W. Roback's Family Pictorial
Almanac. In 1854 he published his magnum opus, the rather handsome, gilt-edged
Mysteries of Astrology, and the Wonders of Magic, dedicated magnanimously 'To the
People of the United States, a Nation neither Skeptical nor Credulous', and in
which he boasted he had 'given audience to more than two hundred thousand
applicants for magical information'. 48 It was not a roaring success and its contents
did not live up to the anticipated occult treasures the title suggested. Regarding its
astrological worth, the astrologist Luke Broughton (1828—98), a linen weaver's
son from Leeds, England, claimed that Roback paid a newspaper reporter to
compile the astrology sections of the book. He denounced Roback as 'a perfect
fraud and an impostor, who knew no more of astrology than he did about
flying'. 49 Broughton, who came from a family well known in Leeds for their
astrological skills, arrived in America in the 1850s and settled in Philadelphia. He
claimed he was soon 'acquainted with nearly every man in the United States who
had any knowledge of the subject'. At the time, he recalled, 'there was not an
American, either man or woman, in the whole United States who could even
erect a horoscope,' and the few astrologers who could were French, English, and
German immigrants. 30 Amongst them he presumably included Hague, who, as
the 1850 census shows, was also born in England. Of the six astrologers recorded
in the 1880 American census three were English and one was German.

As to the magical content of the Mysteries of Astrology, it contained neither
spells nor instructions on conjuration. Yet some people no doubt purchased it
presuming that it did. In 1863, for instance, the Mormon William Clayton wrote
to a New York City bookseller requesting two copies of Mysteries of Astrology, 2nd
'the finest and best article of Parchment that can be obtained'. While he later said
he required the parchment to draw up deeds, the fact that a few months later he
desired to obtain a 'Secret Talisman' suggests that he wanted to consult Roback's
book for advice on magical protection. If so, he was destined to be disappointed. 51
The book was a flop. As well as lacking practical occult information, with its thick,

FRONTISPIECE.

Fig. 19 Purported portrait of Charles W. Roback looking suspiciously like a seventeenth-
century astrologer.

204 I Grimoires USA

gilt-edged pages it was also too expensive to be a mass success. In 1857 a
Philadelphia bookseller was selling it for $2. 50, 52 which was nearly as much as a
week's wage for an agricultural worker and a third of an artisan's weekly salary. 53

In 1855 we find Roback advertising his astrological services from his new base
in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he lived out the rest of his life. 54 By i860 he seems to
have stopped promoting his astrological and magical powers and prospered by
selling his own brand of quack medicines, cashing in on the vogue for blood
purifiers and bitters. He continued to maintain sporadic contact with his family
back in Smaland until his death in Cincinnati on the 8 May 1867. In his will he set
aside $6,000 in restitution of lawful claims made against him by Swedish creditors.
He also left a thousand dollars in gold to his brother-in-law, $300 to his nephew,
and the rest of his estate to his son Carl Wilhelm. His dubious life and flourishing
career in America did not go unnoticed in his homeland. Two pamphlets were
published shortly before and after his death recording the progress of the Fallebo
gok (peasant), the 'humbug' who found an ideal outlet for his huckstering in the
land of opportunity. 56 He was portrayed as the anti-Lind; in other words, a Swede
who gave a bad name to his homeland in contrast to the soprano Jenny Lind, the
internationally popular ambassador of Swedish culture who toured America in
1850. The visit was a great financial success for herself and her promoter P. T.
Barnum, and Roback, of course, could not help make capital out of his fellow
countrywoman, boasting that he had 'foretold the success of Jenny Lind, and
actually named in advance the sum she would realise in the United States'. 57

Roback traded on his foreignness, advertising himself at one time as the 'great
Swedish Soothsayer and Necromancer', and in the Mysteries of Astrology he played
on his Viking heritage. 58 He also laid claim to the exclusive possession of the
medical secrets of his homeland, marketing quack medicines such as his Scandi-
navian Vegetable Blood Pills and Purifier, which he said consisted of 'twenty-
three different species of mountain herbs of his native land'. 59 Yet, unlike
Hohman, he did not write specifically for an ethnic immigrant audience. His
magical and astrological knowledge was not based on the Scandinavian black book
tradition, and he did not even refer to the possession of such a grimoire in his
advertisements. Large-scale Scandinavian emigration to the United States only
began in the late 1860s, and so in Roback's day the Swedish settler communities
could not provide the strong ethnic market that sustained Hohman's occult
enterprises. Roback was hugely successful at appealing to all Americans through
the canny exploitation of newspapers. What he failed to grasp was the appeal of
the older chapbook tradition and the demand for practical magic.

The honour of producing the first American Scandinavian black book goes to
the publisher John Anderson (1836— 1 910), who arrived from Norway at the age of
9 and went on to set up a Norwegian language press in Chicago. The city was the

Grimoires USA | 205

main destination for many Norwegian emigrants, with around a third of the
estimated 150,000 Norwegian Americans settled there by the end of the century.
Anderson was concerned about the decline of the Norwegian language in
America, observing that to preserve it 'we will have to supply our bookshelves
with some of our fatherland's literature.' 60 Up until Anderson's venture in the
1870s nearly all the Norwegian literature printed in America had been religious in
nature, so Anderson set about producing books of folklore, poems, novels,
histories — and magic. A former employee recalled in his memoir that in 1899
' Svarteboken, dealing with witchcraft' were amongst the firm's best sellers. 61 One
of them was probably a cheap book entitled Oldtidens Sortebog (Ancient black book),
published in Chicago in 1892. 62 Only one known copy survives today. It is
an almost exact reproduction of a charm book of the same name published
in Denmark, the main difference between the two being the cover. The
Copenhagen edition depicts the Devil sitting on a crescent moon while the
Chicago version displays its American status by having a picture of a bald eagle.
It contained a familiar mix of magical charms for ailments, catching thieves,
warding off enemies, and provoking love. A 'key' to the secret of the charms,
signed 'Cyprianus', was provided at the back of the book, which reveals that the
formulas provided had to be read in reverse. The most unusual aspect of Oldtidens
Sortebog is the story it tells of its origin. In the introduction, purportedly written by
a monk, Cyprianus is revealed to be a beautiful, fourteenth-century Mexican nun!
Incarcerated in a dungeon by a debauched cleric, Cyprianus makes pages from
shreds of her clothes and writes down her accumulated wisdom in her own blood
to preserve them for posterity. This book of secrets later finds its way into the
possession of a Danish knight and magician who buries it in a golden box. It lays
hidden for ages until a peasant stumbles across it while ploughing and becomes
rich from the power it gives him.

No doubt Anderson had dual motives in publishing svarteboken. They were
evidently a profitable business proposition. Although some Norwegian immi-
grants brought black books with them, demand for familiar medical charms must
have been considerable, particularly amongst rural dwellers. For those Norwegian
settlers who founded Coon Prairie, Wisconsin, for instance, there was not a
trained doctor within 150 miles. Others desired the means to call up the Devil.
In the early twentieth century a Norwegian-American farmer from Dawson,
Minnesota, wrote a letter to the Oslo University Library requesting: 'Do you
have the Black Book that can release Satan and bind him again? If you have it in
clear Norwegian, let me know the price.' 63 Yet at the same time as Anderson was
commercially exploiting popular magical belief, he was also fulfilling his aim
of ensuring that Norwegian-Americans had access to the literary and cultural
heritage of their homeland.

206 I Grimoires USA

Hex doctors and murderers

There was no clear-cut distinction between a pow wow doctor and a hex or witch
doctor in Pennsylvanian German folklore, but there were those who did much
more than cure ailments with herbs, prayer, and charms from the Long Lost Friend.
Hex doctors were known for not only curing the bewitched but also for pre-
venting witchcraft and dealing with witches. For such a task Hohman's book was
useful but not as potent and rich in talismanic aid as the Sixth and Seventh Books of
Moses. Considering that the magic book market of the mid-nineteenth century
primarily catered to Pennsylvania Germans, it is no surprise that the first American
edition of the Moses Books appeared in German in the 1860s. English editions,
clearly based on an example given in Scheible's Das Kloster, were printed in New
York and Elizabethville, Pennsylvania, in 1880. 64 The preface of the New York
edition shared the forthrightness of Hohman's defence of the value of cheap
occult literature, and was honest regarding its usage. 'Let us not, therefore,
underrate this branch of popular literature,' it stated, observing that 'the issue of
a cheap edition will be more serviceable than the formerly expensive productions
on sorcery, which were only circulated in abstract forms and sold at extortionate
rates.'

While the Long Lost Friend was considered a pious work The Sixth and Seventh
Books of Moses had a more sinister reputation amongst Pennsylvania Germans. In
1929 the hex doctor Andrew C. Lenhart told a journalist that he had read both the
Long Lost Friend and the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, but 'once was enough'
regarding the latter. A friend had asked Lenhart to obtain a copy from Harrisonburg.
He read only a few pages before becoming afraid, and recalled:

I was sitting in my home at night. Suddenly a voice in the hallway called
me. I went there. I said, 'Who is it?' There was no answer. I started to
read again. The voice called me once more. It was spooky. I went to the
hallway again, but there was no answer. I again started to read. Suddenly
in the silence of the room I heard awful voices which sounded as if a flock
of geese were quacking. It was terrible. I closed the book and the noises
ceased. 65

For hex doctors, though, possession of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses was
essential to building a reputation. In 1900, for instance, Mr and Mrs Frederick Garl
of Reading hired a hex doctor to rid the family of the witchcraft they believed had
killed eleven of their infants in succession. He provided a charm to protect the
twelfth baby, which he said was from a copy of the Seventh Book of Moses written
in pen and red ink. 66 In February 1906, a few days before his fight with the
Chicago boxer Kid Hermann, the Mexican-American Aurelio Herrera received a

Grimoires USA | 207

letter from a woman, who described herself as a 'student of the occult science',
which contained a charm to help him win. 'I have a receipt taken from the
seventh book of Moses', she wrote, 'which I have prepared and feel confident that
if concealed upon your person during the battle you will be victorious.' The
charm consisted of a bit of cardboard decorated with horseshoes, symbols, and
writing in German script. 'Should you win', concluded the entrepreneurial
occultist, 'you will be glad to reward me. The amount I leave entirely to your
good judgement.' When Kid Hermann was told about the charm, he quipped, 'If
Aurelio wins next Friday night he'll have to have one of those German charms in
each glove.' 67 The fight ended in a draw after twenty rounds.

The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses was more generally associated with
bewitching rather than countering witchcraft. During a divorce hearing in
Pittsburgh in July 19 19 Mrs Sarah Bickel testified that her husband 'took the
Seventh Book of Moses and tried to put spells on me and he said would put spirits in
the house after me.' 68 Its malign reputation was enhanced by a widely reported
murder case in June 1916.

Peter Leas, a 41 -year-old blacksmith of Reading, Pennsylvania, ambushed a
friend named Abraham Fick, a farmhand, stunned him with the handle of an axe
and then chopped off his head. Leas was evidently psychotic, his wife and children
having fled two weeks previously after he had threatened her with a knife. Leas
gave himself up to the police shortly after the murder; 'A Handbook for Bible
Readers and Christian Workers' and a memorandum book containing numerous
scriptural passages were found in his pockets. In his confession Leas said that he
had visited a charcoal burner several miles from his house who had consulted The
Seventh Book of Moses and declared that Fick intended to murder Leas. So Leas
decided he had better act first. The suggestion by some of the press was that Leas's
insanity had been provoked by his own reading of the Seventh Book of Moses. 69

Some of the Moses books' baleful associations were transferred to the Long Lost
Friend following another 'hex murder' that gripped the American press. In late
November 1928 the bound, beaten, and burned body of Nelson D. Rehmeyer
was found at his isolated farmhouse in York County. John Curry, aged 14,
Wilbert Hess, aged 18, and a petty pow wow man named John Blymyer were
soon arrested on suspicion of murder. The Hess family, who were Rehmeyer's
neighbours, had been experiencing a series of misfortunes on their farm. Wilbert
had succumbed to a series of illnesses which had only been cured after his parents
had him powwowed. Witchcraft was suspected. Blymyer, along with his sidekick
Curry, was called in to offer his advice and identify the witch. Blymyer, who
suffered from hallucinations, believed he was also hexed, saying he had been told
as much by the pow wow doctor Andrew C. Lenhart. He had also consulted
Rehmeyer on several occasions.

**" • - — ilifflflh

SIXTH AND SEVENTH BOOKS OF MOSES.

[ 7- sh -

- J } =s

Chap. V.— CONJURATION OF THE LAWS OF MOSES.

7 /V 7> .-j^

• rv

VI.— GENERAL CITATION OF MOSES ON ALL
SPIRITS.

Fig. 20 Talismans from an early twentieth-century pulp edition of the Sixth and
Seventh Books of Moses.

Grimoires USA | 209

Rehmeyer was considered a peculiar fellow in the area. This was partly because
he was separated from his family, and partly because he was an active and vocal
socialist: it was also because he was thought to dabble in braucherei. Blymyer and
others knew he possessed the Long Lost Friend, and it was Blymyer who pointed
the finger at Rehmeyer as the cause of all their problems. Blymyer believed that he
could break the hex upon them by cutting a lock of Rehmeyer' s hair and burying
it, and confiscating and burning his Long Lost Friend. It is not clear from the trial
reports whether Blymyer believed that Rehmeyer used the Long Lost Friend to hex
people or whether he thought that the protective powers of the book made him
immune to counter witchcraft. The latter seems the most likely considering its
content and generally benign reputation. Blymyer knew the book well enough,
for when police searched his room in York they found notes and charms tran-
scribed from the Long Lost Friend and the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses.

On the evening of 27 November Blymyer, Curry, and Wilbert set off for
Rehmeyer's farmhouse to fulfil Blymyer's plan. They brought with them a long
length of rope to bind him. There is no evidence to suggest they had murder on
their minds, but in the struggle to pacify Rehmeyer, they kicked him and hit him
over the head with a piece of wood and a chair. As soon as they realized he was
dead they doused the corpse and set it alight. They fled not realizing that the fire
soon extinguished itself, leaving the murder scene intact. Blymyer and Curry were
convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Blymyer's life
term in the Eastern State Penitentiary was commuted in 1953 . He took up a job as a
night watchman and died a lonely recluse in 1972. Curry served ten years of his
sentence and was then granted a special dispensation to join the army. After
receiving training as a cartographer he participated in the drafting of the Normandy
invasion maps. He returned to York County and became respected for his work on
behalf of the York Art Association. He died in 1963. Hess served a ten-year
sentence for second degree murder and lived out his life in welcome obscurity. 70

As the news broke and the trials proceeded, the press went into overdrive with
headlines screaming, York's Voodoo Cult', 'Scores of Deaths are Laid at Door of
Pow-Wow Cult', and York County Held in Grip of Black Art Practices'. 7 Over
the next few years the Pennsylvania authorities were highly sensitive to the
influence of hex doctors and their books. Only a couple of months after the
trial, state troopers arrested an Allentown hex doctor named Charles T. Belles
after the body of a young woman named Verna Delp was found in a field near
Catasauqua, Pennsylvania. The District Attorney became convinced that her
death was linked with hexerei. What newspapers described variously as 'three
mystical scrolls of witchcraft' or 'cryptic missives' were found on the body. 72
Furthermore Delp, the adopted daughter of a prosperous farmer named August
Derhammer, had, on the recommendation of her father, visited the hex doctor on

210 | Grimoires USA

several occasions for an undisclosed illness. The District Attorney expressed his
frustration at the wall of silence from the local community, who were reluctant to
talk of the hex doctor and his activities. 73 In January 1932 suspicions of hexerei
were also raised when the lacerated body of a young Mennonite church worker,
Norman Bechtel, was found in Germantown. He had been stabbed some twenty
times with a stiletto knife. One newspaper reported that 'weird symbols' had been
carved into his forehead. Another called it 'a crime of mysticism', another a
Pennsylvania 'hex murder'. A few days later, however, investigators shifted their
attention to the idea that he was a victim of a serial killer at large nicknamed '3X'.
Two years later the Department of Public Instruction launched a campaign against
hex doctors after a young farmhand named Albert Shinsky, of Shenandoah, shot
dead a 63-year-old woman believing she had bewitched him. 74

The press portrayal of the Long Lost Friend as a black arts or 'witch book' left an
enduring stain on its reputation. When, in the early 1950s, a folklorist mentioned
it to a Dutch Pennsylvania farmer he was told, 'To hell with that ... I wouldn't
have one in the house, and the old folks would' ve been better off if they hadn't.'
Twenty years later, an acquaintance of another folklorist tried to buy a copy from
a bookstore in Norristown, but was asked to leave. The most recent detailed study
of pow wow practices in the state turned up no examples of its use amongst
current practitioners, though its influence continues through the charms and
remedies that have been handed down. 73

Chicago: city of magic and mysticism

Chicago may have an image as a grim, grey industrial city but in the early
twentieth century it was also a hotbed of mystical, magical, and prophetic activity.
Rural Pennsylvania may have been the centre of pow wow and New Orleans the
home of hoodoo, but Chicago was the undoubted centre of organized occultism
and grimoire publication. It was the archetypal American cultural melting pot,
with a large portion of its population being foreign born, mostly from Germany,
Poland, Austria, Russia, Sweden, Norway, and Ireland. 7 This national diversity
was reflected in the police department. The city's chief of police, Herman
Schuettler, worked conscientiously towards having every nationality represented
in the force. When, in 1908, the first Persian policeman was recruited, the press
joked that 'a Chinese patrolman is all that is lacking now'. 77 The city's population
swelled further during the great wave of African- American migration from the
south to the cities of the industrial north during the 1910s. Racial tensions soon
ran high in the city with considerable violence being directed against African-
American communities, including the bombing of homes.

Grimoires USA | 21 1

With its diverse immigrant population seeking social and economic stability
and a sense of community, Chicago proved fertile ground for mystical and
magical groups. The prophet Cyrus Teed (1839— 1908) evidently found it a
more conducive environment than his previous troubled residences in Syracuse
and New York, even if, according to Upton Sinclair, 'the street urchins of the
pork-packing metropolis threw stones at him'. 78 Teed claimed that in 1869 he
had received a divine revelation from God in the form of a beautiful woman,
who gave him knowledge of the secrets of the Universe. He subsequently took
the name Koresh and preached variously that the Earth was hollow, and that he
would return immortal after his death. 7) He once announced that he could make
gold at will. The newspapers had great fun reporting on the pronouncements,
fantastical schemes, and legal scrapes of what one newspaper dubbed the 'Chicago
Messiah'. 80

More influentially, Chicago was also a spiritual home of African-American
mystical organizations. At the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 a group of African-
American masons launched their own branch of the white Masonic Ancient
Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. It is significant that they inserted
'Egyptian' between 'Ancient' and 'Arabic'. The Black Shriners, as they were more
commonly known, never became a major African-American fraternal society.
One reason may have been that as well as its charitable activities more of its
members were serious about the mystical aspects of their order, contrasting with
the millions who joined the White Shriners, whose meetings were fondly mocked
by Laurel and Hardy in their 1933 classic Sons of the Desert. The Fez-wearing
Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, co-founded by the
actor Billy Florence in 1871, stated that their guiding principle was founded on a
secret Koranic work obtained in Mecca, which revealed a hidden Islamic trad-
ition. While this story was generally taken lightly by its white members, the Black
Shriners took their own version of their Arabic mystical origins more seriously as
an empowering tradition. 82 In the 1920s this, along with the Christian revivalism
brought to Chicago by southern African-American migrants, growing Black
Nationalism, and a flourishing occult publishing industry, helped foster the
Moorish Science Temple. This was founded by the Chicago prophet Noble
Drew Ali, a self-proclaimed 'Angel of Allah', and a major influence on the
development of the Nation of Islam, which in its early years during the 1930s
was labelled by an ignorant Detroit police force as the 'Voodoo Cult'. 83

According to the unreliable hagiographic history that surrounds his life,
Timothy Drew was born in North Carolina in 1886 to ex-slaves living among
Cherokee Indians. He joined a band of travelling magicians in his early teens, fell
in with some gypsies for a while, and at the age of 16 found himself in Egypt. Here
he met the high priest of an ancient mystical religion and underwent an initiation

212 | Grimoires USA

in the pyramid of Cheops. On returning to America the re-styled prophet Noble
Drew Ali preached that African-Americans were the descendants of an Asiatic
nation descended from the Canaanites and Moabites, which in ancient times
stretched from South America, to Africa and Atlantis. The descendants of this
nation were the founders of the Islamic Moorish empire. Like the Black Shriners,
then, the followers of the Moorish Temple reinforced the notion that Black
Americans may have come from Africa but their origins lay in the great civiliza-
tions of Arabia, Egypt, and the East. They were the rightful heirs to the ancient
mystical magical traditions that had fascinated Europeans for so long.

Ali set up the Canaanite Temple in Newark in 191 3 to spread this empowering
message amongst the African- American population, though in 1925 schisms led
him and his followers to regroup in Chicago, which he believed would become
the second Mecca. His followers were easily recognizable in the city's streets as
they were required to wear red fezzes at all times. It was not long before
internecine strife began to fracture the Chicago movement. One cause of conflict
was that several leading members were apparently making considerable money
selling herbs, magical charms, and cult literature to followers. 84 The prophet died
in mysterious circumstances in 1929 shortly after being released by the police, who
had interrogated him, perhaps brutally, following the murder of a leading Temple
follower. The revelatory foundation text of Moorish Science, The Holy Koran of
the Moorish Science Temple, was originally self-published by Drew Ali. Despite its
title it actually had little to do with Islamic teaching, and was largely inspired by
two early-twentieth-century mystical works, the authors of which spuriously
claimed their revelations to be based on secret texts discovered in Tibetan
monasteries. 85 One of them, Levi Dowling's The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ
(1907), purported to reveal the story of how Jesus wandered across Africa and Asia
accumulating and spreading secret wisdom as he went. The other text, Infinite
Wisdom (1923), claimed to be distilled from the mystical knowledge preserved in
Tibetan manuscripts containing the writings of the second millennium bc
Pharaoh Amenhotep IV.

The reputation of Africa as the repository of ancient magical wisdom also rested
on the portrayal of Moses as an African. In the 1930s an octogenarian African-
American resident of Yamacraw, Georgia, explained how the biblical stories of
Moses showed that Africa was a land of magical power since the beginning of
history. As a consequence the descendants of Africans from biblical times had a gift
for doing 'unnatural things'. 87 Advertisements in the African- American news-
paper the Chicago Defender in the 1920s show how gypsies and Hindu swamis were
being challenged by Africans in the magical image stakes. Some advertisements
included photographs of the practitioners in African-style robes. One professor
intimated he had just had some very wonderful African Temple Powder sent

Grimoires USA | 213

from Africa to help his many friends'. Another 'Master of Science' described
himself as a 'Mohammedan native of Africa', who would astonish clients 'with the
marvels of African Science, Powerful Root Herbs and Incense'. 88

Interest in ancient magical wisdom was also being fuelled by a burgeoning
occult press. In 191 8, in a piercing attack on religion and spiritual quacks in the
USA, the socialist author Upton Sinclair described how the shelves groaned with
mystical magazines with titles like 'Azoth; Master Mind; Aletheian; Words of
Power; Astrological Bulletin; Unity; Uplift . . . also shelves of imposing-looking
volumes containing the lore and magic of a score of races and two score of
centuries — together with the very newest manifestations of Yankee hustle and
graft.' 8 '' The advertising columns of the newspapers also indicate there was a
vibrant trade in new and second-hand books at the time. In 1912 the Southern
Astrological School, Fruithurst, Alabama, advertised a full line of occult books for
sale, while in the Oakland Tribune in 1923 advertisements appeared for a circulat-
ing 'Hermetic Library' of 'occult and mystical books' at 138 Grand Avenue/ 0

For the reasons described above, Chicago became an important centre of
occult publication. At the makeshift end of the city's publishing industry there
was Feliks Markiewicz, aka Professor S. Lanard, alias K. W. Sikonowski. In 1912
we find him selling a version of the Seventh Book of Moses and other 'secrets' via his
Great Supply Book Company. His customers must have been bitterly disap-
pointed, though, for Markiewicz's version of the Seventh Book apparently con-
sisted of no more than mundane recipes on how to cure colds and remove warts.
His boasted 'secrets' were no better. One costing $3 concerning how to bewitch
cows read as follows:

If you want to revenge yourself on a neighbour by making his cow dry,
steal into the barn of your enemy before dawn in the morning and milk
the cow yourself and take the milk home. Get him to leave his home
afternoons on some pretext, and during his absence repeat the perform-
ance.

The spell for increasing milk yields was equally disappointing: 'First get a good
milch cow; if she is only a moderate milker, feed her some bran mixed with oats
and corn, and she will immediately give more milk.' Markiewicz evidently found
a niche conning Polish immigrants in this way. He advertised that for $2.50 one of
his publications would enable them to speak, read, and write English in seventy-
two hours. It turned out to be a basic Polish-English dictionary with an instruc-
tion that the purchaser memorize all its contents in three days. It was presumably
one of his many dissatisfied customers that reported him to the Post Office
authorities. 91

214 I Grimoires USA

In 1900 the little known Egyptian Publishing Company of Chicago produced
the first version of the Sixth and Seventh Book of Moses to be printed in a couple of
decades. But it was an edition published in 1910 by another Chicago enterprise,
Delaurence, Scott and Company, the producer of numerous esoteric and magical
publications, which proved particularly influential in spreading its influence
amongst the African-American population. In contrast to the malign reputation
of the Moses Books amongst Pennsylvania Germans, they were treated with
reverence in African-American hoodoo and mystical movements. While this
was predominantly due to the huge importance of Moses in African-American
faith and religious identity, the fact that it was produced by Delaurence may have
also given the edition an extra degree of spiritual aura. The Delaurence influence
is evident from some of the African-American cults and sects that flourished in the
northern cities. Rabbi Wentworth Arthur Matthews (1892— 1972), founder of
the New York Black Israelites, was the leader of one such organization. It was
one of numerous Black Jewish sects that believed they were descended from the
ancient Hebrews. Matthews told his followers that he was born in Lagos, Nigeria,
whereas in fact he was brought up on the Caribbean island of St Kitts. It was
perhaps here that he first came into contact with Delaurence books. Raised a
Methodist he became a Pentecostalist minister in Harlem and during the 1920s, at a
time when Jewish families were moving out of the area, he began to integrate
Judaic ritual and celebration into his church's worship. An examination of his
papers reveals how he also wove grimoire magic into his communication with the
Divine. Matthews was no doubt familiar with Delaurence's esoteric religious
publications on the immanence of God and the like. It was, however, the appar-
ently Hebraic symbols and seals that attracted him to the Sixth and Seventh Books of
Moses, and which shaped what he called his 'cabalistic science'. From amulets
found in Matthews personal papers we can see how he borrowed from those in the
Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses to invoke the presence and power of God. 92

The same Delaurence edition also seeped deep into the thoughts and practices
of rural African-Americans as well. In the 1930s, the folklorist Harry Middleton
Hyatt travelled up and down the eastern half of the country interviewing over
1,600 African- Americans about their magical beliefs. He found the Sixth and
Seventh Books was already an integral aspect of hoodoo conjuration, used in
conjunction with the Bible. As one hoodoo practitioner from Washington DC
explained, 'you kin take and look in de Sixth and Seventh Book of Moses and find
out whut to read, and den you go in yo' Bible and read it from yo' Bible.' The
practitioner said that he was particularly familiar with the fourth psalm 'in order to
accomplish things that you desire'/ 3 It runs as follows:

Grimoires USA | 215

If you have been unlucky hitherto, in spite of every effort, then you
should pray this Psalm three times before the rising of the sun, with
humility and devotion, while at the same time you should impress upon
your mind its ruling holy name, and each time the appropriate prayer,
trusting in the help of the mighty Lord, without whose will not the least
creature can perish. Proceed in peace to execute your contemplated
undertaking, and all things will result to your entire satisfaction.

The holy name is called: Jiheje (He is and will be), and is composed of the four
final letters of the words Teppillati, verse 2; Selah, verse 5; Jehovah, verse 6; and
Toschiweni, verse 9. The prayer is as follows:

May it please Thee, oh, Jiheje, to prosper my ways, steps and doings.
Grant that my desire may be amply fulfilled, and let my wishes be satisfied
even this day, for the sake of Thy great, mighty and praiseworthy name.
Amen! — Selah! — 94

Hyatt asked, 'Is this Psalm in the Bible or in the Book of Moses?' The reply was,
'Both — but de meanings in de Book of Moses — Sixth and Seventh Books of
Moses.' During the 1930s cheap paperback editions of the Sixth and Seventh Books
were produced in their thousands, but Delaurence's name remained indelibly
associated with it — besides much else magical. When Hyatt asked another
Washington DC interviewee who used the Sixth and Seventh Books where to
obtain the necessary 'dove's blood' ink and parchment to write magic prayers, the
reply was, 'Ah know one in Chicago.' When asked the name, the reply was a
hesitant, 'Ah don't lak tuh call dese names. Ah don't know whethah ah'd be doin'
right den.' Reassured by Hyatt, he then said, Well, de Lawrence.' 93

Delaurence

William Lauron Delaurence was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1868. 96 His father
was French-Canadian and his mother Pennsylvania Dutch. Around the age of 17
he worked as a flagman on the Pennsylvania Railroad, warning those working on
the tracks of oncoming trains, before taking up the same role at the Euclid Avenue
Crossing, Cleveland. In his early twenties he started to sell books on psychology
and hypnotism door-to-door, first in Cleveland and then further afield. Around
the age of 24 or 25 he saw a hypnotist on stage at the opera house in Parkersburg,
West Virginia, and began to study the subject and devise his own modest show. In
the late 1890s 'Professor' Delaurence commenced offering lessons in hypnotism in

216 I Grimoires USA

Pittsburgh before setting up a school of hypnotism in Chicago around 1900. So
began the career of America's most influential occultist.

While on the road Delaurence had put together his own manuscript on
hypnotism and submitted it to Fred Drake of the Donahue Company in Chicago.
Donahue's main business was publishing children's literature such as Black Beauty
so it is not surprising that the company was not interested in Delaurence's
manuscript. When Drake left to join the Henneberry Company he was able to
contract Delaurence's manuscript and it was published in 1901. The book sold
well but when Delaurence paid a visit to Henneberry to collect his royalty
payment he was told that the costs of production had been set against his royalties
and that, in fact, he owed the publisher $15. Delaurence hired a lawyer and
apparently successfully sued Henneberry for $3 50. Drake left shortly after to found
his own publishing house, producing a couple of books on the tricks of card
sharpers before finding success with an enduring series of do-it-yourself manuals
on engineering, electrics, sign-writing, and other such trades.

The sales success of Hypnotism: A Complete System, coupled with his bitter
initial experience of the publishing world, inspired Delaurence to set up his own
company, Delaurence, Scott and Company. It is likely that Scott never existed.
When Delaurence was questioned in 1919 about his mysterious partner he was
certainly evasive on the matter. 97 The first of Delaurence's publications was a
revised edition of Hypnotism, followed in 1905 by The Sacred Book of Death, which
purported to be a book of Hindu spiritism, though it is largely plagiarized from
Allan Kardec's Spirits' Book. By this time Delaurence, who had dropped the title of
'Professor' and adopted the more modest 'Doctor', had become a self-styled adept
of Eastern mysticism, presenting himself as a Hindu swami. A trade directory at
the time lists him as the president of 'The Delaurence Institute of Hypnotism,
Hindu Magic, and East Indian Occultism'. He also advertised his prowess as a
palmist in the press, boasting of his international reputation and offering to help in
'business, love, marriage, domestic troubles and all affairs of life'. 99 As to Delaur-
ence's success with the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, he obtained the printer's
plates from Fred Drake, and later recalled, 'I bought the book because there were
many people selling it at that time for $5.00 a copy and I supposed it would be a
good seller.' He thought Drake's plates were a translation from the German, but
was not sure. 100 This was one of a series of magic books compiled and plagiarized
from a variety of published sources. One of his other successes was The Great Book
of Magical Art, Hindu Magic and East Indian Occultism, which initially sold for $12.
As he advertised, it was 'handsomely bound with a durable expensive binding,
with lettering, oriental and occult symbols stamped in a beautiful bright metal
known as oriental gold'. There was nothing Hindu or Indian about its contents
though. It was, in fact, a chopped-up version of Barrett's The Magus with added

Grimoires USA | 217

photographic scenes of India and other extraneous engravings. Wherever Barrett
wrote 'we' Delaurence merely replaced it with 'I'. 101 It was an outrageous act of
piracy and one he would go on to repeat with numerous other English occult
works of the period. In his reprints of the Lesser and Greater Key of Solomon, and the
Sacred Magic of Abre-Melin he did at least mention Mathers' authorship in passing.
Regarding the latter book, though, more space was given to the sales pitch that
Delaurence had paid $75 for a copy in London while he was selling his American
edition for a mere $5.50. He asserted that the cost of publishing and advertising
what he described as his 'superior in every way' edition amounted to $9,000.
None of the profits found their way to Mathers' estate of course. 102

A hitherto unknown aspect of Delaurence's career was his brief stint as leader
of a magic and miscegenation cult known as the Order of the Black Rose, which
apparently worshipped at the feet of a perfumed, wooden cigar-store Indian. The
cult sought to elevate African-Americans and consisted of two orders. Novices
were initiated into the Order of the White Willow, which apparently consisted
mostly, perhaps exclusively, of white women. Before being admitted each woman
was weighed in the nude. The ideas seemed to be that only women with good
figures could progress. Delaurence would come to regret offending an initiate
named Augusta Murie, who he said was 'too fat to be an angel' and suggested that
she take medicine to slim down. The Order of the Black Rose, the cult elite,
naturally consisted of Delaurence and a select group of African- American men.

While it is likely that the Black Shriners influenced Delaurence's mystical racial
ideas, his cult aspirations were probably inspired by the Mazdaznans, a Chicago
sect that also claimed a mystical Eastern heritage. The movement was founded by
Otoman Zar-Adusht Hanish and was a modern formulation of Zoroastrian Sun
worship, which married Eastern mysticism with the vogue for dietary fads. 103
Hanish claimed to be of Persian descent, though others stated he was German,
Polish, or Russian. One report in 1908 suggested he was from Ireland and was
known as Hennessy during an early sojourn in New York. 104 As one of his
admirers, Professor Ardesher Sorabji Wadia, recalled, 'I know very little about
the life of Dr Hanish for the simple reason that he himself kept it a sealed book.' 105
What a surprise.

By the time of Delaurence's arrival in Chicago, Hanish's Sun cult had drawn
many adherents from the city's wealthy white population, particularly the female
portion. In 1906 one newspaper estimated that he had 10,000 Mazdaznan mem-
bers in the city alone. 106 This is highly unlikely though, as his followers desired
social exclusivity and probably never numbered more than a few hundred in
Chicago. Considering his high society clientele, and rumours regarding the sexual
and ritual activities of his members, Hanish periodically found himself targeted by
the police and press. In 1908 he was at the centre of a court cases involving a

218 I Grimoires USA

wealthy disciple named Ellen Shaw, who desired to give her fortune to the
Mazdaznan church, believing she was to become the mother of a new Messiah.
Three years later the press reported that the Juvenile Protective Association was
investigating claims that the Sun Temple was luring wealthy young boys. 107

Hanish initially set up the Sun- Worshiper Publishing Co. and then the
Mazdaznan Publishing Company to spread word of his mystical insights. This
included his 1902 work Inner Studies: A Course of Twelve Lessons, which included
such topics as 'The Secrets of Lovers Unveiled' and 'Magnetic Attraction and
Electric Mating'. It was his mail order marketing of this and other works, particu-
larly to wealthy women, which attracted the attention of the Chicago authorities.
He was charged in 1912 and 1913 for circulating obscene literature. 108 These
concerned his descriptions of the naked form. Books of his sayings and precepts,
such as the Green Book and The Royal Goat, were produced in evidence, copies of
which I have been unable to locate. They may have been the product of journal-
istic imagination — or Hanish's. Then again, they may have been in manuscript or
small private print runs. During the 1908 prosecution case it was stated that some of
his publications were only issued to the 'royal family' of the cult. One newspaper
reported that 'these books are guarded almost with the life of a worshipper. There
are very few in existence and only the very select are allowed to see them.'

In November 19 12 the Chicago police raided Delaurence's 'palatial headquar-
ters' at 3340 Michigan Avenue after receiving a complaint from the defector Mrs
Augusta Murie. Investigations were launched by the Post Office and the Depart-
ment of Justice, and consequently Delaurence and several white women and black
men were arrested for suspected mail fraud and offences under the Mann Act
(White Slave Traffic Act). 110 Shortly before this police raid, members had been
agitated by the plight of Jack Johnson, the world heavyweight champion boxer
who was in gaol awaiting trial under the Mann Act for taking a white woman,
Lucille Cameron, from Minneapolis to Chicago for 'immoral purposes'. The
whole of Chicago was galvanized by the affair. When the news first broke in
October angry crowds gathered in the streets and his appearance led to cries of
'Lynch Him'. The bigoted Chicago clubwomen started a national campaign to
support the prosecution. 111 In this racially charged atmosphere members of the
Order of the Black Rose argued that their followers should employ their occult
arts to ensure Johnson's release. Delaurence disagreed, however, believing that
such a task was beyond the society's jurisdiction. Shortly after this meeting,
Delaurence and eighteen of his followers also found themselves in gaol.

In the end, the authorities did not pursue a prosecution under the Mann Act,
and the trial was concerned only with fraud. An African-American attorney
defended Delaurence and his followers. Murie testified that she only joined the
cult in order to learn the art of hypnotism and became disillusioned when she

Grimoires USA | 219

claimed to have discovered that Delaurence had hidden dictographs in the lecture
rooms to record his disciples' conversations. The personal information he gath-
ered this way was then used to give the impression he could read their minds
when under the hypnotic state. Delaurence was fined $200 and his followers
released. 112 It would seem that Delaurence disbanded the cult after this, though a
reference to it cropped up in 1923 during a curious federal investigation into the
claims of Helen La Maie, wife of the film director and theatre manager Elsier La
Maie, that her husband had tried to sell her to a mysterious, wealthy black gambler
named Lou Harris for $500,000. Helen told the authorities that her husband
wanted her to become queen of the Order of the Black Rose, and that this
would require that she take a black lover in order to further the Order's aim of
equalizing the rights of 'Caucasians and Ethiopians'. 113

This was not the end of Delaurence's trouble with the law. Press advertisements
for his books and his Institute were circulating in Nigeria. In 191 1 Michael D.
Williams, an African pharmacy student at the Colonial Hospital, Lagos, came
across a Delaurence advertisement in a West African newspaper. Impressed by Dr
Delaurence's vaunted powers and potent occult publications, he purchased a copy of
the Book of Magical Art and the Book of Death. In 1914 Williams decided he wanted to
learn directly from the Master and set sail for the USA. He made his way to Chicago,
where he stayed at the African-American YMCA on Wabash Avenue, which had
only been completed a year earlier but had already become an important centre for
migrants. Delaurence gave him employment and received a money order from his
brother back in Lagos to pay for his teaching. Williams was evidently by no means
the first to make his way there. According to Delaurence a great many men had done
so before. 'I never created a desire in any of these men to take up the study,' he said.
As to Williams, he 'seemed to be well educated — and told me he wanted to be well
up in occultism, and it is a well-known fact that on the gold coast of Africa that is
practically the religion, and he said he wanted to perfect himself on that. ' 4 Relations
soon turned sour, however. Delaurence described him as 'an aggressive, quarrelsome
educated proposition' . They had several altercations over Williams' apparent habit of
peering up the skirts of Delaurence's female employees when they climbed the
stepladder in the stockroom. On one such occasion Delaurence struck Williams who
then went and lodged a complaint with the police. Williams claimed Delaurence
tried to hypnotize him against his will and had beaten him over the head with a chair.
He returned to the premises with two plain-clothes detectives and Delaurence made
out a cheque for $1 50 to settle their accounts. Delaurence later accused him of going
to the Chicago press and inducing 'reporters there to write up certain copy about me,
how I treated Negroes and everything of that sort'. 115

Delaurence's last brush with the wrong side of the law was in April 19 19 when
he was tried by the Post Office for 'conducting a scheme for obtaining money

220 | Grimoires USA

through the mail by means of false pretenses, representations and promises'. By
this time Delaurence, who described himself in his puffs as 'the greatest teacher,
author and publisher of Occult and Magical Works the world has ever known',
had given up the troublesome business of occult instruction. He had created a very
successful mail order and retail business, selling not only grimoires but also all the
equipment and 'talismanic and symbolic jewellery' required by students of the
occult and those wishing to better their lives. There were invocation candles for
calling up spirits, 'receiving of oracles, adjurations, and casting out of evil spirits'
($2 a dozen); the Venus, Woman's Love talisman with special silken bag ($1.25);
red coral rings and necklaces to ward off evil spirits and melancholy; and the 'seven
sacred magical art talismans, on genuine virgin parchment'. There was also a range
of Hong Kong and East Indian remedies, some of which, like the 'Lion Stomach
Tonic', he bought in from the Chicago Pharmacy Company.

By his own account he had recently taken in gross receipts of around $40,000 a
year and owned around $100,000 in plates, stock, and merchandise. He estimated
that around 20 per cent of business was overseas, mostly from Africa it would
seem, since he complained that his profits were slim on such orders due to the cost
of first-class post. He also sold a lot of books locally through Chicago and New
York book dealers and stores including well-known names such as Charles
Scribner and Son and Sears, Roebuck and Company. He also supplied the
Western News Company which operated railway newsstands. 116 One of his
most regular clients was the less well-known Oriental Esoteric Library in
Washington DC. This had been founded in 1905 by the retired chemist and
occultist Henry Stokes to promote the dissemination of occult literature. It was
initially part of an esoteric cult known as the Order of the Initiates of Tibet,
though following a bust-up and consequent court case Stokes, who had ploughed
some $35,000 into building up the library, assumed full control. 117

Delaurence was planning on opening a store and was negotiating a five-year
lease at $3,000 a year when he was ordered to appear at the Post Office Depart-
ment. While he was building up his retail business a Chicago Post Office inspector
named Dana Angier had been collecting damning material against Delaurence.
One piece of evidence produced in court was Delaurence's response to a letter
Angier wrote to him under an assumed name, Gabriel Martin, in July 191 5.
Angier was aware of the Michael Williams affair and was evidently posing as
another African student of the occult.

Dear Sir:

Having been in this country now a year and wishing to complete my
training, I am writing you for books on occultism and magic, having
known of you before.

THE UNMISTAKABLE MARK OF
GOOD TASTE

The articles listed and described in
this Catalogue, show the unmistakable
marks of good taste, and are for those
who want only the best. Wherever this
Catalogue goes there are men and
women whose cultivated tastes admit of
no insincerity or pretense, whose trained
. , , mind s j«dge Book, Bible, Jewelry, Dia-

mond, and Merchandise values fairly.

Every customer on our Big Mailing List demands the best,
and it is for them that this Catalogue, which costs thousands and
thousands of dollars, was published. A High Grade Catalogue
like this one makes little or no appeal to cheap vanity, pretense
or sentiment, to crude or untrained buyers, to bargain hunters
or pretenders. It was published exclusively for those who
able to appreciate Values.

Every customer realizes the worth of our Rule of Honesty
that governs all transactions. A rule that has been directly
responsible for our world-wide success. This rule briefly means:
List and sell at the lowest possible price, the best Occult and
Spiritual Books, Bibles, Solid Gold Jewelry, Diamonds, and Mer-
chandise to be had.

Fig. 21 One of many puffs in the De Laurence's Catalog (Chicago, 1940).

222 | Grimoires USA

In reply he received some testimonials, a blank order slip, and an offer to send his
forthcoming catalogue for the price often cents. A correspondence ensued with
Angier receiving numerous further advertisements for Delaurence books and
products. He sent off $2.50 for a two-inch gazing crystal and ten cents for the
catalogue and requested:

Now, sirs, I want you to tell me about your great book 'Albertus
Magnus.' Are these secrets genuine and such as I would be able to
perform as I would like to do wonderful things. I will have money
soon so I will be able to buy this book if it is genuine. 118

Although Delaurence or one of his staff did not elaborate on the genuineness of
Albertus, Angier purchased a copy for $3.35 for his dossier. When it was produced
during the trial the acting solicitor for the Post Office took a particular interest in its
contents, and several passages were read out, such as the following: 'When a horse is
stubborn while being shod. Speak into his ear: Caspar raise thee, Melchior bind, and
Balthasar entangle thee. ' When he was informed that the book was 'sold by hundreds
of different stores throughout the country', he remarked, 'We ought to get the
names of some of those. ' 119 Delaurence claimed in his advertisements for the book
that it was a revised and enlarged edition under his editorship, but during the trial he
admitted that he had done no such thing. 'I attached my name there for the reason
that I believe that when my name is on the book it helps create a sale,' he said. 120

The trial also exposed his limited knowledge of the grimoires he sold. Regarding
Albertus Magnus, he was asked, 'You put him down as a very great man, and
enlightened in his writings, do you believe in them?' 'I am not familiar enough
with his writings to say whether I would or not.' When asked, 'who was Albertus
Magnus?' , Delaurence replied, 'He was a character we find in the Bible. I can't give
the details, he is, I have heard of him spoken of many times.' 121 When questioned
as to his key references on occult matters the following exchange occurred:

'Well, there is another book called "Transcendental Magic."

'Who wrote that?'

'Levi.'

'Is he a doctor of medicine?'

'I don't know as he is a doctor, I don't think he is.'
What is his education along those lines?'
'He is an author on natural magic'
'What are his qualifications as an expert?'
'I could not tell you.

'Any other authorities that you know about that would give any
knowledge on these things?'

Grimoires USA | 223

'Well, there is a Wake, who recently died, he is the author of several
books in London.
'What is Waite's reputation?'

Waite is held by the English press to be one of the greatest writers in
the world upon magic'

'By the English press, what do you mean by the English press?'
Well, the same as the press in this country.'

A. E. Waite was actually alive and well at the time and outlived Delaurence by
several years. He was hardly a darling of the English press though. While Delaurence
knew little of Waite the man he was certainly very familiar with some of his work.
He had the cheek to pirate the Pictorial Key to the Tarot (19 10), written and illustrated
by Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, under the title The Illustrated Key to the Tarot,
and brazenly identified himself as the author. 122 He also reprinted the Book of Black
Magic and of Pacts and Waite's edited digest of Levi's writings, The Mysteries of Magic,
claiming mendaciously that the production of the English original was of poor
quality compared to his American edition printed 'on the finest plate paper'. 123

Yet over the seventy typescript pages of his cross-examination it becomes clear
that Delaurence was not a completely cynical con artist exploiting beliefs he
despised. He accepted that some of his products had no power, that he had no
medical qualifications, that his virgin parchment was often not exactly virgin. But
he discussed his personal beliefs and experiences of the occult with an honesty that
intrigued and impressed his examiners. When asked whether he believed in the
power of his parchment talismans he replied: 'I believe in them. I have one of
them, my boy has one. I know one man who I don't think would part with the
talisman he has got for ten thousand dollars.' He experienced premonitory dreams
and visions, said he had seen a vision in a crystal ball of men carrying a crystal in a
box, and four weeks later he was burgled. 124 He had also received many visitations
from astral beings, such as those of Hindu adepts, and departed spirits, including
numerous communications with his dead brother regarding his wife, and more
sensationally Paracelsus. 125

Although it would seem that Delaurence gave up the idea of opening a retail
store in light of the close attentions of the Post Office Department, his mail order
business continued to prosper. We get a glimpse of his continuing success in
November 1931, when his new premises at 179 North Michigan Avenue were
robbed once again as the day's receipts were being counted. The thieves bound
Delaurence, his wife, and a stenographer with wire, and made off with $2,500 of
jewellery. Tellingly, of the $500 of cash taken $300, was in foreign currency. 126

Delaurence died in 1936 but for many in the Caribbean and West Africa he
became more than a mere mortal. We saw in Chapter 5 how French grimoires

224 I Grimoires USA

influenced the generation of new magical-medical religious cultures forged
through colonization and slavery. In contrast the influence of Delaurence overseas
was not a consequence of authoritarianism and population movements. It was
symptomatic of the rise of American cultural imperialism rather than colonial
imposition. Before the Coca-Cola Export Corporation was set up in 1930
to mastermind what would become the global dominance of the beverage,
Delaurence had already successfully masterminded an American cultural export
revolution. But it is important to remember that Delaurence was not pushing an
iconic American product, or even promoting American values. He was success-
fully exploiting American commercial techniques to repackage and promote the
wisdom and mysticism of the East and not the superiority of the West.

Delaurence overseas

Until Delaurence the impact of European grimoires in colonial Africa seems to
have been negligible. The Bibliotheque bleue did not have the same impact in
France's North African territories as in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean. There
was no cheap occult publication industry in Britain to export to its colonies.
Delaurence filled the gap in the English-speaking African market. Nowhere were
his publications more influential than in Nigeria. As is evident from the Michael
Williams affair, his catalogues and his reputation was already circulating there
before the First World War. There was a strong educated interest in foreign occult
traditions, the Kabala and freemasonry in particular. A branch of AMORC was
established there in 1925, and Western occult literature and charms were adver-
tised in the Nigerian press and were available in the streets of Lagos and other
towns. 7 The circulation of Nigerian magazines and newspapers also led to the
Westernization and Delaurencification of medical traditions in the neighbouring
former German colony of Cameroon. Work among the Wimbum tribe has
shown that The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses has altered their beliefs about
the source and workings of 'bad' or magical medicine. 128

Delaurence's works influenced the development of several popular religious
movements in Nigeria, such as Mami Wata worship. This was centred on a water
spirit, the image of which was taken from a German chromolith of a snake
charmer printed around 1885 and copied and reprinted many times in England
and India. The popularity of the image in central and West Africa generated a
demand for Indian prints of other gods, goddesses, and spirits, which became
incorporated into the Mami Wata pantheon displayed in shrines. These also led to
an interest in both Hindu and Western ritual magic, to which many Africans
attributed the financial success of Indian immigrants and Europeans. Delaurence's

Grimoires USA | 225

role in this is evident from an interview in the early 1980s with a Mami Wata priest
of the Igbo ethnic group in Nigeria. Chukwu Emeka Ifeabunike, alias 'Dr
Candido of India', who claimed to have studied Hindu occultism in Bombay
and New Delhi, practised magical healing, counter witchcraft, and fortune-
telling. His shrine was full of images and statues of Hindu gods and spirits, a
small coffin, candles, pots, incense sticks, and other accoutrements of his trade.
Amongst his most prized possessions were two books from the Delaurence
company, the Great Book of Magic and The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. He
kept one of these outside the entrance to his shrine opened at a page in which
magical signs were clearly depicted. The door to a ritual bathing area was carved
with images based on illustrations from Delaurence books. Dr Candido, like many
Delaurence adherents, was unaware that he had long since died, praising him 'as a
very knowledgeable man', and saying that 'one day he hoped to go to America
and visit him.' 12J During the 1980s, anthropologists studying the Ibibio tribe of
southeastern Nigeria found that people were also ordering charms from the
Delaurence Company at considerable personal expense. 130

The influence of Delaurence is less obvious but still evident in the influential
Church of the Lord (Aladura) movement founded in 1930 by the Nigerian
Yoruba prophet Josiah Olunowo Oshitelu. This former Anglican schoolteacher
experienced a series of visions and divine communications, which he wrote down
in six large journals in his own arcane script, written from right to left as in Arabic
and Hebrew. They also contained a series of sacred seals and signs. Magic and
traditional cures were prohibited by the Church, as followers need only place their
faith in God and seek his aid through fasting, prayer, and the power of the psalms.
Yet studies of the Church written in the 1960s noted that members consulted
Western occult literature, and suggest that the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses in
particular, had some influence on Oshitelu's ideas and the construction of his
sacred script and seals. Although Oshitelu never admitted as such, he did mention
in one of his publications, The Book of Prayer with Uses and Power of Psalms, that
'Some will say this is Moses' Book therefore it is bad.' 131

Ghana was the other great centre of Delaurence. In the late 1950s anthropo-
logists found copies of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses circulating in the
country. While it is not impossible that German editions found their way there
from the neighbouring, pre-First World War German colony of Togoland, the
source of the English language editions was almost certainly Delaurence. Some of
his publications such as The Aquarian Gospel, Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, and
The Book of Magical Arts, Hindu Magic and Indian Occultism have been found in the
bookstalls of Ghana's towns and cities. 132 In the 1950s a patient at an Asante shrine
confided, 'I have ordered the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, because with it
you can work wonders and without it you can't go to England.' Howard

226 | Grimoires USA

French, an African affairs journalist for the international press remembered the
awe surrounding the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses during his school days in
rural Ghana during the late 1940s. Some older boys indulged in fasts and ritual
washing and were caught murmuring incantations from the Moses Book, which
was thought to have been imported from India, but was almost certainly bought
mail order from Chicago despite the fact that the Post Office had prohibited its
import. A cousin told him that it contained talismans 'which could be ordered and
used to attract girls, or to play better at football'. But if the instructions were not
strictly followed it could induce madness, and merely glancing at some of its
contents without saying the correct incantations would make one go blind. 'My
dread of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses was as nothing compared to what
I felt when I was told that there was another book that was even more advanced in
occultism, called The Eighth and Ninth Books of Moses,' French recalled. 134

Just as we have seen how in Europe and America grimoires assumed greater
potency for having supposedly originated from other countries, so in western Africa
overseas objects also accrued magical power. While Americans looked to Asia and
Africa for new commercial sources of occult influence, Africans looked to the West.
An anthropologist researching the medical beliefs of the Wimbum of Cameroon in
the early 1990s found that the tribal elders cherished their collections of Toby jugs
from colonial days more than their ritual masks and elephant tusks, while knives and
bugles offered as gifts by German colonialists prior to the First World War were
thought to have mystical qualities. 135 In the 1950s a Swiss theologian, Hans
Debrunner, was disgusted to find that some literate Ghanaians defrauded their
fellows by selling magical charms marketed as being from overseas. One of his
respondents observed: 'some people, I hear, protect themselves against witchcraft
by ordering some Indian and American rings and talismans. Ministers of the Church
and even some teachers do it, with the idea that the European-made protectives are
neater and more portable.' " 6 Some were local knick-knacks given a foreign origin
while others were, indeed, obtained from American occult catalogues.

For some outside commentators this injection of Western literary occultism
had spread a pernicious mental virus that inhibited the development of West
African culture. Hans Debrunner believed the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses had
led 'to a sort of psychological slavery' for those who owned it. A psychiatric study
of Ghanaians conducted in the 1950s seemed to confirm Debrunner's fears,
concluding that the expressed intention to make magic with the Sixth and Seventh
Books of Moses heralded the onset of schizophrenia. The government's ban on its
sale was thought to be in response to 'its frequent use by incipient schizophrenics
in cemeteries at night'. For Debrunner, Western grimoires were 'definitely worse
than the traditional ways of protection', and he hoped that the pernicious influ-
ence of such imported literature would be broken as 'good books' became more

Grimoires USA | 227

accessible through the public library system. ~ Amongst the 'good books' was the
Bible of course, but for many the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses were biblical,
and attempts to suppress them was just another example of the white man's
intention to withhold secret wisdom.

Delaurence was and is respected in West Africa but in the Caribbean he
achieved mythical status. The name of Delaurence was legendary in Nevis,
being associated with the supernatural figure of a diabolic white-suited man on
a white horse that betokened death. In Grenada one man, evidently conflating
Delaurence with Father Christmas, described him as a magician 'in Chicago near
the North Pole and lives with a large number of pigmy servants'. In the Windward
Islands the De Laurence Catalogue is considered to be a black arts book in its own
right, used by those who call upon the Devil. The Chicago address of the
Delaurence Company is consequently a jealously guarded secret. 138 While
Delaurence had an impact in former and current French colonies where the
Petit Albert already had a firm hold, 139 it was in the British colonies that Delaur-
ence had the most profound influence.

In Trinidad, which the Spanish surrendered to the British in 1797, an anthro-
pological study conducted in the 1940s in the settlement of Toco, in the northeast
of the Island, revealed how Delaurence had already become central to its magical
religious culture. Among village elders 'great interest was expressed in the books
of de Laurence'. One man observed that 'the work that de Laurence does is a
correct Baptist work. They are taught in the spirit.' 140 The content of his
publications were absorbed into both Orisha worship and the rituals of the
Spiritual Baptist churches, which went on to flourish after the colonial prohibition
of their services was repealed in 195 1. The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses were
almost certainly the inspiration for the various 'spiritual' symbols used in some
Spiritualist Baptist ritual worship, just as they were in some west African religious
movements. 141 Small groups of men would club together to share the costs of
buying his publications such as the Greater Key of Solomon, the Lesser Key, and
Albertus Magnus, as well as the roots, divining rods, and crystal balls offered in the
Delaurence catalogue. The island's authorities banned Delaurence publications
before and after independence in 1962, but copies remained easy to obtain,
though they fetched high prices. Recent studies of religious life in Trinidad and
Tobago confirm the lasting influence of Delaurence. Today the Keys of Solomon,
Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, and Aquarian Gospel are consulted by most Orisha
priests, and continue to be quite widely read by members of the various Spiritualist
Baptist churches. They are treated as being equally important as the Bible. It has
recently been reported that The Great Book of Secret Hindu Ceremonial and Talis-
manic Magic is currently the most widely distributed grimoire in the country. 142

228 | Grimoires USA

1/- For

Dm LAURENCE'S

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Ob 7km Occo/f Artt and Sciences

BOOKS on Cabalistic aid Ctrtmonlal Hifi«. Oc
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awtlona far .tudymj OcanttluB and Magic and aiany helaful
and itimolatlaa aaaaya for tha atutjtat. Many bavt found
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Occultitt - Myrtle
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Eftablltbad 1892

C^- %**4 I/— for Year Copy Today!

deUURENCE 197839 CATALOGUE

S7S •»»♦. Sbt KxW Inthtt. Addrtti:

THE Do LAURENCE COMPANY, INC.
Daaartaaat KG
ITS N. Mkhiian A«a.. Cbleaaa. Illlnoli. U.S.A.

Da Laurtnce't lnvtrt-
ed "Oavatoamant Tri-
angle" !• ilr»n FREE
with avtry eapy of
tbii Catalogue. Tbt

Triangle baa aaf-
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ental Colin a od if I
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Fig. 22 Delaurence advertisement in The Daily Gleaner, 30 August 1939.

Nowhere in the Caribbean did Delaurence have a more profound social
influence than in Jamaica. His works and products played a significant role in
the practice of Obeah, while the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses formed part of the
canon of mystical biblical texts influencing Rastafarianism. 'If you weren't reading
de Laurence in those days, you weren't considered to be doing anything great,'
recalled one Jamaican talking about the Rastafarian movement in the 1930s. 143
The sociologist and prize-winning novelist Erna Brodber recalled that during her
childhood in the mid-twentieth century Delaurence was a 'mighty powerful force
in our rural peasant lives'. In her youth she puzzled over 'whether De Laurence
was a man, a set of books or both'. As elsewhere in the Caribbean, he was no mere
human but a mystical, magical force. 144 Even in the 1980s his name was a potent
force, with one businessman telling Brodber that the amazing successes of a
recently instituted anti-crime squad were due to the fact that they were trained
'upon De Laurence'. 145

Grimoires USA | 229

In 193 1 Norman Washington Manley, the lawyer and future Prime Minister of
Jamaica, conducted the defence of an 'East Indian' named James Douthal who
stood accused of practising Obeah. Indians, mostly Hindus, made up the largest
ethnic minority in Jamaica, many thousands having settled there and elsewhere in
the Caribbean as indentured labourers, encouraged to emigrate by plantation
owners following the full abolition of slavery in 1838. Douthal was the victim
of a sting by the Jamaican police, who regularly employed such methods to trap
practitioners of Obeah. An undercover policeman asked Douthal to do something
against an enemy who was threatening his livelihood. For -£4 45. Douthal agreed
to make his enemy go mad. He tried to achieve this by lighting three candles and
burning a black powder and a piece of paper on which he had written something
in red ink. The resulting ashes were to be sprinkled around the gate of the enemy's
house. On his arrest, police confiscated books of 'a religious, quasi-religious or
mystical nature' and 'several letters to and from large publishing companies abroad
showing that the accused bought books from them, and was himself a student on
the subject of the carrying of talismans and the burning of incense'. 146

What such imported mystical works might have been is indicated by a trial
three years later. In January 1934 a young man of Cold Spring named Leonard
Weakley was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for practising Obeah. Two
witnesses stated they had consulted Weakley regarding the theft of a cow at
Montego Bay. They were suspected of the crime and wanted Weakley to use
his magic to ensure they evaded the law. When the police searched Weakley's
house they found, The Sixth & Seventh Book of Moses; The Albertus Magnus or the
White and Black Arts far Men and Beasts; The Great Book of Black Magic; The Book of
Magical Art; and the Hindoo Magic and Indian Occultism. Weakley had obviously
been ordering from the Delaurence catalogue. Asked by the judge how he came
to be in possession of such books, Weakley lamely replied that they were not his
but they were given to him as security for a loan. 147 When, a month later, Ivanhoe
Baker was charged with practising Obeah, and books of astrology, personal
magnetism, and the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses were found in his house,
he similarly said that the books were already in the property when he moved in. 148

The law against Obeah in colonial Jamaica was directed at 'any person who, to
effect any fraudulent or unlawful, or for gain, or for the purpose of frightening any
person, uses or pretends to use any occult means'. More to the point, it also
included a section against any person that 'shall compose, print, sell, or distribute
any pamphlet or printed matter calculated to promote the superstition of obeah'.
The punishment was up to ,£30, or in default, up to six months' imprisonment. 14 >
It was presumably the numerous court cases brought during the 1930s that led the
British colonial authorities to instigate further legislation to stem the Delaurence
influence. Under the Undesirable Publications Law of 1940 it became an offence

230 I Grimoires USA

'either to import, to publish, to sell, to distribute, to reproduce or without lawful
excuse to be in possession of . . . All publications of deLaurence Scott and
Company of Chicago in the United States of America relating to divination,
magic, occultism, supernatural arts or other esoteric subjects.' The Book of Magical
Arts, The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, The Book of Black Magic, The Secret Magic
of Abra-Melin The Mage, The Magic Key, and the Great Book of Magical Art were all
specifically mentioned in the Act. Most of the other works on the banned list were
trade union and communist works. Magic and socialism were deemed on a par as
pernicious social influences.

While the government justified the ban as a means of protecting the people
from those who exploited 'superstition' for financial gain, the Jamaican opposition
to colonial rule saw it as a cynical attempt by the British to limit the influence of
unionism and the American black empowerment movement. 150 Yet the ban
remained in place following Jamaican Independence in 1962, and the list of
prohibited grimoires continued to be published periodically in the Jamaican
newspapers by government order. 5 The ban, like all such prohibitions, may
have kept Delaurence off the shop shelves and out of the newspapers' advertise-
ments, but it could not stop his publications being read and used. American
visitors were one possible source of new illicit copies. An anthropologist in
Dominica described being incessantly asked by islanders to smuggle in illegal
Delaurence tarot cards. 152 Although until the mid-1960s the USA had very strict
visa regulations regardingjamaicans, some migrants who were allowed to work or
live there must have purchased Delaurence works. One of these was Bishop
Kohath, a Kingston auctioneer and spiritualist healer, who read a range of
Delaurence books during a lengthy stay in the USA in the early 1960s. They
were central to the religious principles of the Black Jewish sect he founded once
back in Jamaica, the Yahvah Little Flock Assembly, Mystic Centre. 153

The law was the cause of considerable embarrassment in 1970 when the leader
of another of Jamaica's numerous sects, Wilbert Peynado, Bishop of the Church
of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Montego Bay, and his wife, were arrested for possessing
ganja and a copy of the Master Key, which a detective found in a trunk in their
bedroom. The case was swiftly dismissed by the magistrate's court. A chemist said
the substance recovered was 'not ganja within the meaning of the Dangerous
Drugs Law', while the presiding magistrate decided speciously, 'this book is
apparently written by L. W. deLaurence but there is nothing in the book to
show that it is published by deLaurence, Scott & Company incorporated of
Chicago.' 154 When Michael Norman Manley, son of Norman W. Manley,
came to power as leader of the left-wing People's National Party in 1972 he lifted
the ban on seventy-one publications listed in the Undesirable Publications Act.
Considering Manley's socialist politics, and policy of rapprochement with Cuba,

Grimoires USA | 231

it was no surprise that most of the newly sanctioned publications were of a socialist
nature, but the continued ban on occult works puzzled some. A lengthy article in
the leading Jamaican newspaper The Gleaner failed to make sense of Manley's
decision. 'There must be some good reason for this', its author thought, 'but it has
not been made clear to the country. There is a strong suggestion here that freedom
of political reading is to be preferred to other types of reading such as Black Magic
or the Occult.' 155

Remarkably the ban remains in place today. The website of the Jamaican
Customs Service informs visitors that the following are prohibited items: 'All
publications of deLaurence Scott and Company of Chicago in the United States of
America relating to divination, magic, occultism or supernatural arts.' 156 Recent
research on Jamaican folk medicine reveals that, despite the ban, Delaurence's
influence spreads far beyond the chapels of the various revivalist and evangelical
groups that flourish on the island. He, his publications, and the company have
coalesced into a powerful spiritual and magical force. Delaurence is 'science'. It is
also a specific category of occult illness. As one practitioner explained, there is
'natural evil' associated with duppies (the restless spirits of the dead), and 'flying
evil' which is associated with white spirits originating from Delaurence. They can
cross water and are therefore not restricted to the island. They can be sent, some
people think, from Chicago, the home of Delaurence, and also from England. 157
Delaurence can also cause stones to rain down poltergeist-like on houses, and send
flying razor blades to shred the clothes of people who have not paid their fees to a
practitioner of his science.

Pulp Magic

Delaurence began his publishing empire at a time when most books of
substantial length were bound in hardback. This kept production costs
high and, consequently, while some of his titles went through numerous editions,
their price was still out of the reach of many. In 1913, for instance, we find a small
advertisement in one American newspaper offering new copies of The Book of
Magical Art for sale at $5, knocked down from $12. 1 This may have been a bargain
indeed, but it was hardly affordable out of loose change. As we have seen, cheap,
mass-produced grimoires had been produced for several hundred years in Europe
in the form of chapbooks and the Bibliotheque bleue. But it was only in the 1920s and
1930s that a similar boom occurred in America as part of the influential cultural
phenomenon of pulp literature. While Delaurence continued to publish his
handsome hardbacks with their gold embossed occult symbols, other small, enter-
prising occult publishers exploited this new, mass-market book format, which
consisted of coarse wood-pulp paper pages and glued rather than stitched bindings.

American printers had always suffered from a shortage of rags, and by 1857 the
USA was importing over forty million pounds in weight of linen and cotton rags
from across the globe to sustain its publishing industry. 2 By the end of the Civil
War paper prices were at an all time high, and as one newspaper warned, 'while
such prices prevail, cheap books and newspapers are out of the question.' Across
Europe and America the race was on to find a commercially viable alternative.
Considerable entrepreneurial effort was expended experimenting with the pro-
duction of straw, hemp, and grass paper. It was wood, however, which proved the
most appropriate raw material and America certainly had that in plentiful supply.

Pulp Magic | 233

The first wood-pulp paper mills were set up in the 1860s and the shift away from
rag pulp began. The quality and durability of the paper was certainly not as good,
but as a government census agent reported in 1884, 'it answers the transient
purpose for which it is employed.' In other words it enabled a massive expansion
in newspapers and pulp magazines. The latter became hugely popular during
the early twentieth century, providing between a hundred and two hundred pages
of escapist racy, pacy fiction involving detectives, cowboys, romance, and
science fiction for as little as a dime. Sold in drugstores, bus and train stations,
and newspaper stands, pulp literature was directed at and primarily consumed by
the urban working classes. 3 It was the success of such cheap, populist literature that
eventually led mainstream publishers in the 1930s to adopt the same production
values, heralding the paperback revolution.

Pulp also came to signify not only the quality of paper but also the merit of the
contents printed on it — worthless, pappy, throwaway literature fit only for those too
intellectually limited to digest more serious fare. They were not the sort of publica-
tion that found their way into academic and public libraries. Yet their influence was
such that, by the late 1930s, American educationalists were waging war on the genre.
One high school teacher writing in 1937 observed that some 90 per cent of older
high school students read pulp magazines that required 'no mental effort from the
reader'. The 'mere mention of "pulp" magazines used to fill my mind with pious
wrath,' she said. Further investigation led her to develop strategies to wean them off
such literature, admitting, 'the process is slow — dishearteningly slow.' 4 While west-
erns, romances, and detectives were the mainstay of the pulp fiction industry, dream
books, fortune-tellers, and grimoires provided the ultimate fantasy. Their contents
held out the promise that readers could shape their own destiny rather than merely
live vicariously through the sensational exploits of fictional characters. The market
for magic and divination was huge. In 1943 it was estimated that $200,000,000 or so
was being handed over to an estimated 80,000 professional fortune-tellers in the
United States. 5 The pulp publishers responded. Tens of thousands of copies of The
Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, Albertus Magnus's Egyptian Secrets, Pow-Wows: Or,
The Long-Lost Friend, and the Secrets of the Psalms poured from the presses, selling for a
dollar a piece on the streets. In the back of some editions was the publisher's
statement in large type, 'Agents can make big money with these books — apply to
your jobber or direct to us.' 6 As well as through mail order many copies were sold by
urban druggists in African-American districts and in occult merchandise shops often
known as 'spiritual', 'religious', or 'candle' shops. 7 In 1929 an American newspaper
article observed,

It is amusing to find how possessors of such volumes as the Sixth and
Seventh Book of Moses, 'Egyptian Secrets' by Albertus Magnus, 'The

234 I Pulp Magic

Long Lost Friend' and similar publications set exaggerated store upon
them. They think they have great rarities of priceless value. Carefully
guarded, these books are usually kept for the eyes of the select few. Yet
they are the cheapest books in the market and are as common as almanacs
when you know where to shop for them. 8

The most successful of these new paperback occult ventures was the Dorene
Publishing Company founded in New York in 1937 by Joseph W. Spitalnick, the
son of Russian immigrants. 9 Spitalnick, who anglicized his name to Joe Kay, made
a modest living as a jazz musician and in the 1930s decided to supplement his
income by becoming a small-time publisher, setting up first Dorene and then
Empire Publishing a few years later. His first venture in the occult paperback
market was a manuscript given to him in 1937 by a man named Mr Young, as
payment for a debt. Kay hawked the publication door to door and found a ready
market amongst the numerous storefront fortune-tellers and psychics in New
York. Other works followed, selling for between 1 and $3.

One of Dorene's earliest successes was Black Herman: Secrets of Magic-Mystery
and Legerdemain, which capitalized on the fame of Benjamin Rucker, the most
successful and well-known African-American magician of the era. The cover
depicted Rucker sitting astride the globe, garbed in a gown, an amulet around
his neck and a scroll with 'Power' written on it in one hand. A publicity
photograph of Rucker in a similar pose, scroll in hand, ran with the caption,
'the world famous magician, master of Legerdemain, holds in his hand the paper
containing all of the magic secrets which have been hidden for centuries.' The
image was one of a powerful African- American reclaiming the mystical wisdom
that had for so long been withheld by the whites.

Rucker was born in Amherst, Virginia, in 1892. In his youth he became
fascinated by the card tricks performed by a travelling salesman of quack medicine
called Prince Herman, whose name was presumably inspired by editions of a
popular paperback book on conjuring tricks entitled Herman's Book of Black Art
Magic Made Easy, written by the well-known American stage magician Alexander
Herrmann (1844-96). Rucker became the Prince's assistant and on his death in
1909 Rucker began his own career taking the name Black Herman, and later
adopting the titles of Professor and Bachelor of Divinity. So far there was little to
distinguish Black Herman from the swarms of snake oil salesmen with their bogus
credentials who plied their trade around the States. It was when he branched out
into faith-healing and fortune-telling that his financial success took off. He also
became increasingly skilled and ambitious with regard to the tricks he performed
to drum up trade. By the early 1920s he was famed throughout the Midwest and
living comfortably with his wife and children in Chicago. His career and fame

THE SIXTH BOOK OF MOSES.

The Seal.

(Fig. 8.)

. mn ,t obedient Angels and Spirits of this Seal of the Seven Plane*
t je foHowfng : Ahafb, Baneh, Yeschnath, Hoschiah, Betodah, Ley

,f ' Ya tear?he e ni r aid Sa u h ; n n the treasure earth, or when pUced within
« ofa mine, will reveal all the precious contents of the mine. At
, Arcanorum.

l ,rvr /fe) "Jcjps "a-mo^n .-Mam **i

End of the Sixth Book of Moses.

Fig. 23 Seals from an early-twentieth-century pulp edition of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses.

236 I Pulp Magic

advanced even further when he moved to New York where his performances at
Liberty Hall, the headquarters of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement
Association, sold out night after night. He loved to play on the fact that he
possessed real magical powers derived from his African ancestry. One room in
his New York home was decked out with an altar decorated with occult symbols,
candles, and a human skull, and African masks hung on the walls. His success was
only marred by a short stint in Sing Sing prison for fortune-telling. He died
performing onstage at the Old Palace Theater, Louisville, Kentucky, in 1934. 10

Although Joe Kay first published Black Herman four years after Pucker's death (we
can dismiss the Dorene claim that it was the fifteenth deluxe edition), it is possible
that the magician wrote some of it. Pucker had some publishing experience, having
written a cheap how-to guide called Easy Pocket Tricks That You Can Do. In the late
1920s he had also funded the publication of The Spokesman, a short-lived monthly
magazine for New York African-Americans, in which the occasional interesting
article punctuated acres of space devoted to promoting himself. 11 Some sections of
Black Herman read clearly like the sort of puff that quack doctors and stage magicians
had long published to promote themselves on their travels, and the preface and
foreword are dated 1925, New York. The section recounting the extraordinary 'Life
of the Great Black Herman' smacks of familiar self-publicity. Its vaunted boasts of
great secrets discovered during fabled global travels follows in the footsteps of occult
hucksters like Charles Roback, though Pucker was perhaps influenced more by the
legendary journeys of the likes of Noble Drew Ali.

Black Herman's 'Life' claimed he was born in the 'dark jungles of Africa'. 12 He
was possessed of 'knowledge of hidden mysteries' from birth, and it was foretold
that he would grow up to be the greatest magician that ever lived. At the age of 10
he was taken to America by a missionary. As a young man he travelled to Cairo,
'where all the secrets of the ages are held'. He next moved on to India where he
befriended a great Hindu magician. In China he fell in with a secret society of
robbers. He feigned his death by using his arcane knowledge of medicine, and his
friends had his body sent in a casket to the Zulu king in Africa. People under-
standably fled in fear when he appeared to return from the dead when it was
opened. After a few weeks of further amazing adventures in Africa he set sail for
France, and then moved on to Britain for a short stay before returning to America
the wisest magician in the world. He printed brief encomiums from the places he
had visited. London said with regret, 'We hated to give him up,' while Paris
uttered messianically, 'He is the first and last.' Columbus, Ohio, was much more
down to earth in its praise: 'It is more fun to see Herman than it is to see a barrel of
monkeys with their tails chopped off.' 13

The sum total of the wisdom garnered from Herman's extraordinary experi-
ences, as revealed in Secrets of Magic-Mystery, consisted of no more than simple

Fig. 24 Black Herman: Secrets of Magic-Mystery and Legerdemain.

238 I Pulp Magic

sleight-of-hand tricks, basic horoscopes for each month of the year, and a guide to
the signification of dreams. It is only the poorly written final section, entitled 'The
Story of Oriental Magic I found in the Orient an Ancient Practice: Called by
some the Magic of the Kabbara Herbologist, Mystic', which takes us briefly into
the realms of the grimoire. It includes advice on how 'to bring happiness to
broken lives' by carrying the Seal of Moses in one's pocket, and the following
instructions on how 'To Cross or Hex a Person: Cast a Spell — No Matter Where':

There are many different ways I gathered to do this, one of the most
popular is to put some hemp string in the person's path and then some
Oriental Gum — another way is to use some crossing powder, Confusion
Dust — another way is to send them some Black Art Powder and Oil.

A remedy to banish the 'source of unhappiness' required the reader to wash all the
floors, doors, and beds, everything in fact, with Chinese Wash and then to say the
following prayer every day:

O! Lord, Father, King please help (name here) thy child to banish
unhappiness, misery, to remove it at the source. Help me. Father, to
overcome these things that hold me down. Thank you, and then to
believe all misery banished and it will be banished.

No ceremonial spirit conjuration here, and as the above extracts suggest, some of
the spells were basically vehicles for product promotion. A recipe for gaining the
love of the opposite sex also required a pint of Chinese Wash, which was a simple
cleansing scrubbing liquid containing 'oriental gums', lemon and ginger grass,
which accrued a reputation at the time for also cleansing rooms of evil spirits and
bad luck. 14 Another spell for 'uncrossing friends' required Van Van Oil, King
Solomon Oil, Dragon's Blood, John the Conqueror Root, and Devils Shoe
String, all of which were commercial hoodoo products. Dragon's blood, the red
resin obtained from two species of Dracaena trees found in Africa, had long been
used in Western folk medicine and magic, and in nineteenth-century England it
was commonly bought from chemists for use in love spells. 15 John the Con-
queror, the legendary name for various roots such as jalap and galangal, which
were marketed as powerful luck charms, was a distinctive component of the
African- American folk magic tradition. 16

This commercialization of charm production developed out of the flourishing
trade in herbs, charms, perfumes, oils, candles, and other ingredients sold by
druggists and the numerous 'spiritual', 'religious', or 'candle' stores that sprang
up in urban African-American communities. Many such shops were merely
retailers, purchasing goods from mail order wholesalers run mostly by whites.
Quite a few of these companies were offshoots of toiletry and cosmetics

Pulp Magic | 239

manufacturers already prospering by making beauty products for the African-
American community. As a 1920s survey of advertisements in the Chicago Defender
and the Negro World, the leading African-American newspapers with a nation-
wide circulation, showed, there was a huge market for skin lighteners and
hair-straightening products amongst the newspaper-reading public at the time. 17
One such enterprise was the Valmor toiletry company of Chicago, a subsidiary of
which, the King Novelty Curio Company, produced a comprehensive
catalogue of charms and spiritual products during the mid-i930s. It included
seals from the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, dream books, and occult texts,
along with lingerie, cosmetics, and hoodoo products. 18 These companies also sent
salesmen around southern African-American communities, and hired representa-
tives, such as Mattie Sampson of Brownville, Georgia, who sold the products of
the Lucky Heart Company and the Curio Products Company. One of her best
sellers was the Mystic Mojo Love Sachet. 1 }

Big strides had been made in African-American educational provision during
the 1920s and 1930s, though several southern States lagged badly behind. In
Louisiana, for example, over a fifth of African-Americans had no schooling at
all, leading the founder of the Nation of Islam, the mysterious W. P. Fard, to
denounce such obscurantism as 'tricknollogy', the deliberate attempt to keep the
people enslaved through illiteracy and therefore ignorance. 20 In the northern
States and cities, however, literacy rates were high by the 1940s. Consequently
the press came to compete with the Church as the most important institutional
influence on African-American social and political opinion. 21 Newspapers depend
heavily on advertising revenue as well as purchasers, of course, and so the Chicago
Defender and the Negro World also became important facilitators in the commer-
cialization of off-the-shelf magic. They provided both magical practitioners and
mail order manufacturers with a cheap means of reaching potential African-
American and white clients living far beyond their shops and warehouses. As
we saw in the last chapter, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the press
had helped generate the huge market in quack medicines and astrology, and now
in the early twentieth century the African-American press led a similar boom for
hoodoo and conjure products. A trawl of five African-American newspapers over
three months in 1925 turned up numerous advertisements for such products as the
Sacred Scarab Ring of the Pharoahs, which would shower riches, success, and
happiness on the wearer, the Imp-O-Luck Charm to 'make things come your way',
and the Mysto Talisman Ring that 'wards off evil spirits, sickness, spells'.

African-American magic also kept pace with other commercial developments.
By the 1960s those Hoodoo favourites, graveyard bones, were increasingly being
substituted by plastic ones, while the increasing use of smoke detectors in rental
properties led to the development of incense aerosol sprays for ritual use. 23

240 I Pulp Magic

Charms, grimoires, and dream books were also bought wholesale and sold
directly to clients by hoodoo workers, conjure doctors, and spiritualist preachers.
In 1940 The New York Amsterdam-News estimated that in Harlem alone more than
50,000 people were consulting such people annually, spending nearly $ 1 ,000, 000. 24
One of the most common reasons was to ensure success in illicit gambling, the
hugely popular Numbers Racket in particular. This involved the picking of a three-
digit number, the winning combination of which was picked randomly the
following day by such means as drawing it from the racehorse results. A whole
magical trade developed around this, just as treasure seeking had done in previous
centuries. The commercial success of John the Conqueror was due, in part, to its
purchase by gamblers. As one conjure doctor pitched: 'Y'know, the women and
the numbers, they's both jus' alike. Ain't neither of 'em can hod out long when yuh
got Bigjohnny workin' fo' yuh.' 23 Gamblers also splashed themselves all over with
magic perfumes such as Essence of Van Van (10 per cent oil of lemon grass in
alcohol). 6 If this was not enough, psalms for luck, such as those in the Secrets of the
Psalms, and the fourth and 1 14th psalm from the Sixth and Seventh Books, could be
employed. The latter instructed, 'if you desire success in your trade or business,
write this Psalm with its appropriate holy name upon clean parchment, and carry it
about your person constantly in a small bag prepared especially for this purpose.' 27
These psalms were also sold in the form of medals and written on pieces of
parchment in red ink.

On the last page of Black Herman was the following statement: 'I am told one
can gain a Mastery over Occultism by reading and studying some of the works of
Lewis de Claremont, L. W. De Laurcne, Wait, Macgrueger, Duval Spencer and
Young, and in this way can help to become an initiate.' The reader is already
familiar with the work of Delaurence, Waite, and Macgregor, but what of de
Claremont, Young, and Duval Spencer? 28 It is certainly curious that these are the
only three names spelt correctly, the others perhaps being unfamiliar to
the typesetter. The reason for this may have been because they were one and
the same man; someone who, it is likely, also had a hand in writing parts of Black
Herman. It was a Mr Young who gave Joe Kay his first occult manuscript
for publication. Young's name was also given to a brand of Chinese Wash sold
by the Oracle Products Company. The earliest occult publications of Lewis de
Claremont, who was described in advertisements as 'the famed adept', and was
depicted as a Hindu swami, were The Ancient Book of Formulas and Legends of
Incense, Herb and Oil Magic, both of which were published by Oracle. The latter
book contained sections on 'How to fix Devil's Shoestring' and other products
mentioned in Black Herman. It would appear that de Claremont was the nom de
plume of Young, who was also the proprietor of the Occult Products Company. 2)
In 1940 de Claremont/ Young assigned the copyright of his publications over to

Pulp Magic | 241

Dorene. Amongst them were The Seven Steps to Power and The 7 Keys to Power:
The Master's Book of Profound Esoteric Law, which contained recipes for candle
magic, benedictions against enemies, dream magic, and numerology, along with
discourses on hypnotism and Hindu magic. They were advertised a few years later
as 'Two of the World's Foremost Occult Best Sellers'. 30 According to Ed Kay, the
son of Joe Kay, Young was also the one and the same as Henri Gamache, who
wrote a series of magic pulps in the 1940s, which were published by Sheldon
Publications and marketed by Dorene, among them the Mystery of the hong Lost
8th, gth and 10th Books of Moses (1948) and the Master Key to Occult Secrets (1945).
Gamache's Master Book of Candle Burning had the most enduring influence. One
expert on African-American folk magic, who visited many magic shops during the
1970s, found that it was for sale in every single one. 31

Whether Gamache and de Claremont were one and the same is open to
question. The style and content of Gamache's work are significantly different
from that of most of de Claremont's booklets, which heaved with product plugs.
Gamache's approach consisted of the presentation of conscientiously referenced
snippets of spells and magic culled from an eclectic mix of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century discourses on ancient Judaism, Christian, and other Middle
Eastern religions, and studies of African, Indian, European, and Caribbean folk-
lore. 33 Indeed, the subtitle of the Master Key was 'A study of the survival of
primitive customs in a modern world with sources and origins'. In the Preface he
explained how it had taken him three years to accumulate all the material. His
reason for going to all this effort? Because 'it presents truthfully the lengths to
which humanity will extend itself in an endeavour to gain what its heart desires.'
Gamache was not disingenuous enough to claim that his motives were solely
educational, yet neither was he ready to acknowledge that the book was intended
to be used as a grimoire; yet it was, along with the Mystery of the Long Lost 8th, gth
and 10th Books of Moses. Chapter 3 of the latter, entitled '44 Secret Keys to
Universal Power', consisted of a series of magical seals and amulets for love,
recovering buried treasure, wreaking vengeance, and protection gathered from
diverse sources. Gamache turned educational literature into magical literature,
performing a sort of alchemy by taking a mish-mash of excerpts from magical
traditions across the globe and revealing them as the universal keys to the founding
occult wisdom of Moses.

It is revealing of the cultural reach of American pulp magic that as early as 1949
an anthropologist researching the Carib culture in British Honduras, now known
as Belize, referred to the influence there and in neighbouring countries of The
Seven Keys to Power, The Secrets of the Psalms, and The Ten Lost Books of the
Prophets 34 In Jamaica, and elsewhere in the Caribbean where the Delaurence
oeuvre had been banned in 1940, the de Claremont and Gamache books filled the

242 | Pulp Magic

vacuum. During the second half of the 1940s a Kingston mail order company,
Spencer's Advertising Service and Commission Agency, regularly advertised the
full range of Gamache and de Claremont publications in the Daily Gleaner, along
with Secrets of Psalms and the Long Lost Friend, all of which were available from
Dorene. 36 A survey of the books sold by Kingston drugstores half a century
later found that they consisted almost exclusively of dream books and the
works of Gamache and de Claremont. 37 They never achieved the mythic status
of Delaurence, but their works were seen as being more accessible. As a
Montserrat 'scientist' explained, 'Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses do not help
much. Help only a master or adept. The naive medium not able to operate that
book. They use Black Herman or the Seven Steps to Power and the Seven Keys to
Power.'™

The Hispanic market

Dorene also turned an eye to the burgeoning Hispanic market, producing a
Spanish translation of de Claremont's Legends of Incense, Herb and Oil Magic in
!938- 39 The decision to do this may have been triggered by the evident growth of
the Puerto Rican population in New York, the area of East Harlem in particular.
During the 1920s it had been a predominantly Italian district, the biggest in
America, with a large Jewish community as well, but in the 1930s many moved
out while increasing numbers of African-Americans and Hispanics, mostly Puerto
Ricans, moved in. 0 The sound of Spanish voices became a familiar sound on the
streets of northern cities for the first time.

Botanicas were and are key institutions in Puerto Rico's tradition of folk
medicine, selling not only herbs but also Catholic sacramentals, incense, candles,
oils, statues, and representations of the saints, along with charms and grimoires —
in other words, all the ritual paraphernalia required by adherents of Espiritismo and
Santeria. 41 As One Puerto Rican botanica shop owner in 1960s Chicago reported,
most of her business was not concerned with drugstore medicines for natural
ailments, but 'supplies to people affected with brujeria [witchcraft]'. Another
important sideline for her were products such as incense and bath herbs to
promote luck, particularly for the numbers. 42 Probably the first High Street
botanica to be set up in America was that established in East Harlem in 1921 by a
Guatemalan named Alberto Rendon. He had worked in a drugstore and noticed
how many African Americans and West Indians came to purchase herbal remed-
ies, bath oils, and powders for magical purposes. So he opened the West Indies
Botanical Garden, selling his own herbal products, some of which were based on
plants sent to him especially from Puerto Rico. As the ethnic balance of the area

Pulp Magic | 243

changed Rendon shifted the focus of his product range from the hoodoo and
Obeah requirements of his black customers to those of the followers of Central
American Espiritismo. The store's name was consequently changed to Botanica. 43
Over the next few decades, as Hispanic immigration increased, particularly with
the huge exodus from Cuba as a consequence of the Cuban Revolution of 1959,
botanicas spread across the United States. 44 By 1970 there were at least twenty-five
in Chicago, and in the past couple of decades they have become particularly
popular in the Southwest of the USA, with several hundred stores in Southern
California alone. 45

The Mexican magical healing tradition of curandismo has been practised in the
southern USA for much longer, and in the mid-twentieth century folklorists
and anthropologists commented on how it had remained largely impervious to
European- American influence. It was not completely free of it though. The lure
of foreign occult secrets was irresistible to some. In the 1970s a Texan curandero
practitioner attempted to impress one researcher by showing him 'two books on
witchcraft, which he would not let me touch. Since he could not read English, he
showed us pictures from the books, commenting on each.' Another curandero,
eager to impress, read some passages from the Bible and a bilingual edition of
Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. It is true, though,
that the North American grimoire tradition had less impact in Mexico and other
Central American countries than it did in the Caribbean. A major reason for this is
that Spanish grimoire publishing kept apace.

Between the two World Wars several editions of the Libro de San Cipriano were
produced by publishers in Barcelona and Madrid, and Portuguese versions in
Lisbon. 47 These could be ordered by overseas customers of course, but during
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was a huge migration of
Spaniards to the Americas. Between 1900 and 1924 some five million left, heading
mainly for Argentina and Cuba, though 3.8 million returned home. Around one-
third of the emigrants were Galicians, and another 20 per cent came from
neighbouring Leon and Asturias. 48 These were, of course, the northwestern
regions where the Libro de San Cipriano or Ciprianillo tradition was strongest and
some emigrants must have brought copies with them. Ethnographers studying the
religious cultures of Cuba during the first few decades of the twentieth century
found the Libro San Cipriano had been adopted by Santeria practitioners, and was
being sold along with editions of the main French grimoires. 4 ^ Judging from a
copy found on a wizard imprisoned by the Sao Paulo authorities in 1904,
Portuguese migrants also brought copies with them. 50

Under Franco's regime occult publications were effectively suppressed in
Spain, and it was only from the late 1970s onwards that a new wave of editions
poured off the Spanish presses. 5 In the meantime Spanish language grimoire

.a

Magia Suprema

Negra, Roja e Infernal

OE LOS

CALDEOS Y DE LOS EGIPCIOS

traducida, compilada y comentada, con sujeccion al texto hebreo
POR EL

DOCTOR MOO RN E

Fig. 25 La Magia Suprema Negra (1916).

Pulp Magic | 245

production shifted decisively to Latin America. 3- Buenos Aires, the principal
post-war publishing centre in the region, and also the home to hundreds of
thousands of Galicians, was one source of grimoires. As early as 1916 a limited
edition Solomonic work entitled La Magia Suprema Negra was produced there,
though its stated place of publication was Rome. Its equally spurious author was
the legendary tenth-century monk Jonas Sufurino, finder of the Libro de San
Cipriano/ The man who supposedly translated it from the German and edited
it was the mysterious Dr Moorne. An early-twentieth-century catalogue of cheap
occult publications produced by the Madrid publishers Libreria de Pueyo shows
that Dr Moorne was cited as the translator of a raft of cheap magic books at the
time, few of which now survive, such as El Libro de Simon el Mago (2 pesetas), and a
joint Spanish edition of the Enchirideon and Grimoire de Pape Honorius (6 pesetas). 54
It was in South America, though, that his name became most well known,
particularly in Argentina. This was not only due to the grimoires he purportedly
translated, but also for a long-running, successful set of Tarot cards attributed to
him, El Supremo Arte de Echar Las Cartas, which were first published around the
1930s and sold far and wide by peddlers.

It is possible that the earliest South American edition of the Livro de Sao
Cipriano was produced in neighbouring Brazil. A Sao Paulo publisher advertised
a booklet for sale in 191 6 entitled O Verdadeiro e Ultimo Livro de Sao Cipriano (The
True and Last Book of Saint Ciprian). 55 Dr Moorne's Magia Natural was certainly
published there in 1928, testifying to the pre-war origins of Brazil's occult
publishing industry. It was in the 1960s, though, that the first mass-market editions
of the Livro de Sao Cipriano were printed in the country. By the 1990s publishers in
Rio and Sao Paulo had put out at least seventeen different editions. 56 Some
continued to reprint the lists of buried treasures to be found in Portugal and
Galicia. 57 Treasure was probably not uppermost in the minds of most purchasers
of the Livro de Sao Cipriano. Many were and are followers of Umbanda, a hetero-
dox, protean religion based around a pantheon of spirits including Yoruba deities,
and the spirits of native Indians and slaves. It emerged in the 1920s, growing out of
Candomble, folk Catholicism, Kardecism, and spiritualism, and spread rapidly from
the mid-century onwards in the country's industrial centres. 58 The Livro de Sao
Cipriano was added to the mix and became a popular seller for the Rio de Janeiro
occult publisher Editora Espiritualista, which, from the 1950s, produced a range of
books on magic and spiritualism for those interested in or initiated into
Umbanda. 5)

It is likely that it was these Latin American editions of the Libro de San Cipriano,
rather than the earlier Spanish ones, that leached into the indigenous Indian
magical traditions in some regions of South America. In the 1970s the anthro-
pologist Michael Taussig found itinerant Putumayo Indian magical healers selling

246 I Pulp Magic

a version of the Libro de San Cipriano, along with roots, barks, sulphur, and
mirrors, in their street stalls in the southern Colombian town of Puerto Tejada.
One copy he saw was ascribed to Jonas Surfurino and contained 'The Clavicule of
Solomon, Pacts of Exorcism, The Red Dragon and the Infernal Goat, the Black
Hen, School of Sorcery, The Great Grimorio and the Pact of Blood'. The
Putumayo were thought by the dominant Hispanic population of the region to
be adepts in the healing arts and deep in both good and bad magic — a reputation
that they understandably exploited commercially. 60 In the 1980s the Libro de San
Cipriano was similarly found to be a significant component of the famed healing
practices of the Bolivian Kallawaya. Since at least the eighteenth century the
Kallawaya, who live on the eastern slopes of the Andes near the Peruvian border,
have been consulted from far and wide for their herbal and magical knowledge.
Some of the tribe continue to make a living as itinerant practitioners, bringing
their herbs, stones, and amulets with them. Not only do they consult the contents
of the Libro de San Cipriano, the book itself is imbued with purifying qualities. 61

During the second half of the twentieth century Mexico City was probably the
most active and influential centre of pulp grimoire production in Latin America. 62
A survey of the cheap books on magic and divination sold by peddlers in two
Peruvian towns in 1967 revealed Mexican titles such as La Magia Negra, La Magia
Blanca, and La Magia Roja. 6 In 1976 a Mexican publisher produced the first Latin
American edition of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. It was apparently a
translation of one of the US editions and had a print run of 5, 000. 64 Copies of
these Mexican grimoires became a staple product for botanicas and yerberias across
Central and South America, and in southern US towns with large Hispanic
populations like Tucson, Arizona. 65 In the past few years a new generation of
Mexican pulp spell books with cheap-looking garish covers have appeared, such as
Brujeriia: hechizos, conjuros y encantamientos and Brujeria a la Mexicana. These also sell
well across the border and can be purchased mail order from the likes of Indio
Products, one of the biggest mystical supplies companies in the States, founded by
Martin Mayer in 1991. Mayer's aunt and uncle had run a hoodoo drugstore in
Chicago's South Side during the 1920s. 66

The cultural influence of Mexican magical commerce in the USA is also
evident in the recent growth of the Catholic folk cult of Santisima Muerte (Holy
Death), which some of the recent Mexican pulp grimoires promote. The image of
the spirit of the Holy Death is that of a robed female skeleton. Because of this
macabre image she is associated with evil by some, and is seen as the patroness of
Mexican drug lords. Yet in Mexican folk religion the Santa Muerte has also
become an intercessionary patroness, resorted to by 'good' Catholics as well as
those seeking to inflict harm. 67 The creators of spiritual products have been quick
to adopt the striking image, using it to market prayer cards, Holy Death incense

Pulp Magic | 247

sprays, and the like, supplanting that of the Hindu Swami popular on earlier
hoodoo product labels. It is through the botanicas that she has also been incorp-
orated by some into the pantheon of Santeria, which has become increasingly
popular amongst Mexicans. A few years ago the Bishop of Leon called on the
Mexican government to suppress a newly created independent church, La Iglesia
Catolica Traditional Mex-Usa, dedicated to the worship of the Santa Muerte. The
growth of the cult in Southern California and Arizona has also led to expressions
of concern regarding the influence of yerberias and botanicas and their merchan-

The war against grimoires in Germany

It was in Germany, though, that the publication of cheap grimoires proved most
contentious. Esotericism flourished in early-twentieth-century Germany and
Austro-Hungary. As in England, America, and France, there was considerable
middle-class interest in spiritualism, ancient religions, mystical belief systems, and
ritual magic. 69 Theosophy was particularly popular and gave birth to the spiritualist
Anthroposophy movement of Rudolf Steiner. By 1912 there were also thirty-three
Mazdaznan branches in Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Switzerland. Leipzig
became the cult's second home outside of Chicago. Numerous homegrown groups
sprung up. A few years before the First World War the Ordo Novi Templi, which
claimed an occult inheritance from the Templars, was founded by the Austrian
right-wing anti-Semite, Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels. He was a follower of the
mystical, Aryan supremacist doctrine of his fellow Austrian, the writer and runol-
ogist Guido von List (1848— 1919). Their racist philosophy of a supreme Teutonic
life force, known as Ariosophy, later fed into Nazi racial ideology. Another society
that claimed a Templar heritage was the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), whose
overtly magical philosophy was based, they said, on Eastern mysticism, and
Masonic and hermetic secrets. Aleister Crowley set up a branch in England. The
writings of Eliphas Levi were an undoubted influence, as was Beverley Randolph's
conception of sex magic — a strong theme in German ritual magic.

This esoteric boom generated a thriving occult publishing industry. In 1906 the
German Theosophical Society set up their own publishing house in Leipzig,
which produced not only theosophical works but also astrological periodicals
and books. 70 The list of the Berlin publisher Herman Barsdorf Verlag contained
a mix of erotic books and texts on ancient magic, including translations of the
works of Francois Lenormant. Its most impressive occult publishing venture was
the five-volume Magische Werke {Magic Works) (1921), which included editions
of the Heptameron, Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, and the Arbatel. The 1922

248 I Pulp Magic

catalogue of another Berlin publisher, Nirwana-Verlag fiir Lebensreform,
contained 937 books on astrology, religion, spiritualism, magic, and sex, which
were advertised in the form of a poem:

Study the catalogue diligently,
And quickly choose
Many books, rare, ideal
Solid works full of power,
For every scientific branch,
Especially for the occultist. 71

Another leading publisher in the field was Johannes Baum. By the 1930s Baum
Verlag had become a major force in occult publishing with a series of titles on
modern Rosicrucianism and books such as the Handbuch Der Astromagie (1926).
One of Baum's most prolific authors was G. W. Surya, the nom de plume of the
occultist Demeter Georgievitz-Weitzer (1873— 1949), who before the First World
War was editor of the popular esoteric magazine Zentralblatt fur Okkultismus, and
who later wrote guides on Rosicrucianism, medicine, and alchemy. Equally
prolific was an intriguing character named Franz Sattler (b. 1884), an expert on
Arabic dialect and founder of the Adonistic Society, a sex-magic group formed in
1925. Under the pseudonym Dr Musallam, he wrote a series of publications for
the Berlin publisher Bartels on astrology, chiromancy, magic, and necromancy,
which collectively came to be known as the Zauberbibel or Bible of Magic. 72

During the first two decades of the twentieth century Bartels was the main
producer of grimoires in Germany, reprinting versions of works culled mainly
from Scheible's Das Kloster. It published several large compilations of between 500
and 700 pages including the Romanusbuchlein, Der wahrhaftigefeurige Dmche, and the
Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses 13 Bartels was also responsible for the introduction
to a wider audience of Das Buch fezira, described as the 'Big Book of the Moses
Books'. The title was borrowed from the Sefer Jezirah, but its contents consisted of
the eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth books of Moses. In 1917 it was
noted that a Munich bookshop was selling numerous copies of this publication to
women, probably wives and mothers seeking protective magical aid for their
husbands and sons in the trenches. 74 Bartels also sold cheaper single editions of the
Eighth and Ninth Books of Moses, as did other publishers such as Max Wendels
Verlag in Dresden and Hulsmann Verlag in Leipzig. It was sales of the Sixth
and Seventh Books of Moses, though, that far outstripped the other grimoires in
Germany. During the 1920s and early 1930s at least five publishers were producing
editions, most with Philadelphia as the place of publication. 73

It was presumably one of these editions that police found amongst spiritualist
books in the house of Fritz Angerstein, the director of a cement works near

Pulp Magic | 249

Siegen, Westphalia, who in 1924 murdered eight members of his household with
an axe, including his wife. She was a devout Pietist who had apparently miscarried
several times. These influences no doubt contributed to the morbid premonitions
she experienced, and which played on her husband. 76 Rumour would later have it
that Angerstein was inspired by the hope of activating a seal said to be contained in
one edition of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, which would provide great
riches to anyone who killed nine people. The case attracted press attention around
the world, and he was beheaded in November 1925. As well as the occult
connection, the case was also notable as one of the last in which the authorities
took seriously the notion that the violent last moments of the murdered were
imprinted on the retina for a short time afterwards. Local police took photographs
of the eyes of one of Angerstein's victims after someone in the morgue said they
saw the image of Angerstein with a raised axe in the eyes of the corpse. 77

During the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich there were at least seven-
teen court cases in Germany involving the belief in witchcraft, some of which
involved the 'Moses Books'. 78 A report on one trial in the town of Stade in 193 1
commented that spell books were to be found in many houses in the area. When,
in 1 93 5 , an old couple in the Black Forest complained of being plagued by witches
and ghosts, they hired two men from the town of Haslach who tried to rid the
house of evil influences by reading invocations from the Sixth and Seventh Books of
Moses. 79 Most such cases seem to have been prosecuted under the general laws for
fraud, but the authorities in Bavaria were particularly well equipped to deal with
the occult arts. Article 54 of the Bavarian police code allowed for the imprison-
ment of those who practised magic, spirit conjuring, and divination for profit. Just
after the end of the First World War the military authorities in Bavaria extended
this clause to punish those who lectured on such subjects without having any
scientific qualifications.

Numerous sensational and dubious claims have been made regarding the
influence of occultism on Hitler and the architects of the Third Reich. There
certainly were prominent Nazis who had an active interest in various aspects of
the occult, most notably Himmler, Rudolf Hess, and SS-Obetfuhrer Karl Maria
Wiligut, who, influenced by the work of Guido von List, developed his own
mystic 'key' to the meaning of runes. 81 From the beginning of the Third Reich,
however, the authorities were concerned that occult philosophies could under-
mine popular confidence in the supremacy and glorious destiny of the Reich.
A recent authoritative study has rightly stressed that the Nazis' 'selective affinity
for occultism was dwarfed by the enormity of their regime's hostility to the occult
movement more generally'. 82

Predictions and prophecies had long been exploited by rulers for political
propaganda purposes, but they had to be strictly controlled; otherwise, they

250 I Pulp Magic

could unsettle and sow fear amongst the populace. The Nazi authorities decided
that the balancing act was not worth it. In the autumn of 1933 the police in Berlin,
Hanover, and Cologne ordered newspapers to cease accepting advertisements for
astrologers. The following year, the Berlin police banned the sale and production
of astrological periodicals and almanacs. Booksellers' stocks were confiscated. 83
The next step was to suppress the wider occult community. Individuals were
targeted — people like Eugen Grosche, a Berlin bookseller and founder of the
Fraternitas Saturni, whose private library was seized by the Gestapo. 84 In July 1937
an official decree outlawed Freemasonry, occult societies, and religious sects like
the Christian Scientists throughout the country. The extent to which these
clampdowns affected provincial publishers is not clear, though the occult
publishers Baum Verlag and Regulus Verlag of Gorlitz, which published books
on astrology and Nostradamus, evidently continued to operate until June 1941
when the authorities rounded up occultists of all shades, closed down all occult
publishing houses, and confiscated publications. 85 The trigger for this purge was
the propaganda embarrassment of Hess's bizarre flight to Scotland, which Goeb-
bels portrayed as the actions of a man unhinged by his association with astrologers
and seers. A line was drawn in the sand, and occultism would no longer be a public
issue in Nazi Germany.

During the Third Reich the authorities were concerned not only with forms of
mass-market divination but also the esoteric belief systems embraced by the
middle classes and urban blue-collar workers. Occult philosophies came to be
seen as antagonistic to the shared ideology being forged by the Nazi regime.
When, in the autumn of 1937 the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps printed a
series of articles on the danger of Aberglaube (superstition), which it typically
blamed on Jews and the Catholic Church, the focus was on the evils of spiritu-
alism and astrology. 86 The world of rural folk magic slipped under the radar: this
was 'superstition' that had no philosophical or organized framework and therefore
posed no threat to Nazi hegemony. Cunning-folk were periodically prosecuted,
but no more so than in Weimar or Imperial Germany. The Third Reich was,
nevertheless, hardly a propitious time to publish popular grimoires — particularly
the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses with its pseudo-Hebraic characters. 87

Neither did the academic study of 'traditional' magical beliefs seem to attract
the same opprobrium as intellectual occultism. Indeed, Himmler's interest in the
idea that the witch trials were a Church-inspired crime against the German people
led to the formation of the H-Sonderkommando unit, a team of around eight
researchers employed to find and catalogue early modern witch prosecutions in
German-language archives. 88 Regarding contemporary folk beliefs, the Nazis
enthusiastically promoted the academic respectability of German Volkskunde
(folklore), funding research and creating the first professorial chair in the subject

Pulp Magic | 251

in 1933. Nazi support for folklore research came at a price of course. The
discipline was partly under the brief of Himmler's SS Office of Ancestral Inher-
itance, and partly under the supervision and control of Alfred Rosenberg, one of
the architects of the Nazis' racial policies and Hitler's supervisor for All Intellec-
tual and Worldview Schooling and Education'. Folklore had to have a purpose
beyond mere scholarly interest. If folklorists wanted to be sponsored they had to
work for the good of the National Socialist message, legitimating Nazi racial
theories and promoting the purity and nobility of 'true' Nordic-German tradi-
tions, folktales, and rural cultures. 89 Those who did not display sufficient enthu-
siasm for the Nazi 'project' were swiftly unseated from their chairs. One of those
who prospered was Adolf Spamer, a Nazi party member and director of the
Regional Research Office for Folklore in the Reich Union Folk-Nation and
Homeland. He also happened to be the leading expert on German folk grimoires.

In 1907 the German Union of Folklorist Associations agreed to organize the
creation of a Collection of German Formulae for Charms and Incantations. This
was inspired, in part, by the collection of German manuscript charms, celestial
letters, and magic manuscripts gathered by Albrecht Dieterich, an eminent expert
on ancient Egyptian magic who was also fascinated by German folk magic. It was
no doubt also inspired by the publication in 1902 of the pioneering assemblage of
Nordic manuscript grimoires and charms by the Norwegian clergyman and
politician Anton Christian Bang. 90 Spamer was instrumental in getting the
Union's project underway, and in 1914 published an Appeal to Colled German
Formulae to German, Swiss, and Austrian folklore associations. Over the next few
decades he personally accumulated a comprehensive collection of published
grimoires and manuscripts. 91

Spamer's ambitious ideas for German folklore research and willingness
to cooperate with Rosenberg's bureau meant that by 1936 he had been elevated
to Professor of Folklore at Berlin University, and was described by one colleague
as 'the Pope of Volkskunde'. Yet in 1938 he fell out of favour due, in part, to
scholarly differences with another influential folklorist more closely associated
with Rosenberg's agenda. 92 Ill health further inhibited his work during the early
1940s. His fortunes improved soon after the war, though, when he became the
first academic folklorist to be appointed in Russian-controlled East Germany,
becoming Professor of Volkskunde at the Technical University of Dresden. His
passion for folk magic resurfaced publicly and led to the establishment of the
Corpus of German Formulae for Charms and Incantations. In 1949 he gave a
lecture on magic books and spells to the German Academy of Sciences, and by the
time of his death in 1954 the Corpus collection housed an impressive 22,000
items. Some of the fruits of his research on grimoires were collated in a
book tracking the bibliographical history of the Romanusbuchlein in which he

252 | Pulp Magic

meticulously traced the origins of nineteen of the charm formulae it contained.
A posthumous article on magic books also appeared, which recorded the letters
received between 1925 and 1935 by a Dresden publisher of grimoires, revealing
the popular demand for instruction on practical magic. 93

For some, the cleansing of the curse of Nazism also required the rationalizing of
German society. The enthusiasm for occultism in the early twentieth century was
viewed as a contributor to the Sonderweg, or special path that the course of
Germany history took in its development into a racist totalitarian state. 94 So, in
post-war Germany, middle-class occultism, alternative medicine, and folk magic
were seen by some as an obstacle to the forging of a new social and moral
enlightenment. There was a raft of court cases involving witch belief and magic
in post-war Germany. This has been interpreted by historians as a result of
increased witchcraft accusations arising from general economic and social instabil-
ity, and related to the large number of single women returning to rural commu-
nities after the war. )5 From a contemporary perspective it was confirmation of the
'superstitious' darkness that had flourished during the Third Reich. For anti-
superstition crusaders the two main pillars upholding the edifice of superstition
were the influence of Hexenbanners (witch doctors) and the dissemination of
occult literature prior to and after the Third Reich.

For several years after the war the German publishing industry was under-
standably in bad shape. Paper and ink were in short supply and the transport
network badly damaged. The two major centres of German publishing, Berlin and
Leipzig, had suffered from Allied bombing. Currency reform also led to further
short-term hardship and a shortage of money. In Soviet-controlled Germany
publishing houses were either nationalized or forced out of business. One conse-
quence of the blow to the old established publishing industry was the expansion of
publishing in West German provincial centres such as Stuttgart and Hamburg.
Although Allied authorities in western Germany banned the writings of promin-
ent Nazis, censorship was not heavy-handed and only in the French sector were
publishers required to submit manuscripts for inspection. 96

The Third Reich and occupation forces aside, democratic Germany had its
own strong tradition of censoring Schund (trashy) and Schmutz (dirty) publica-
tions — in other words pulp literature, which was considered deleterious to
Germany's youth and therefore the future of the nation/ 7 In 1926 the Weimar
government had instituted a law concerned with identifying and blacklisting
cheap and easily available books and magazines that glamorized violence and sex
or offended public decency. However, due in part to excessive bureaucracy the
law largely failed in its aims, with the exception perhaps of pornography. The
Nazis were, of course, far more successful in controlling popular literature,
ensuring the format was used to spread Arian political aspirations. In post-war

Pulp Magic | 253

Germany the old worries over corrupted youth returned. The concern was not
only with the lingering influence of Nazi indoctrination, but also the growth of
American cultural imperialism. The influence of American pulp magazines and
detective and western serials had already been a concern in Weimar Germany, but
now the floodgates were fully open. This was not just a German fear. At the same
time a similar vociferous campaign against the tide of American pulp also rose in
Canada, with talk of the country becoming an open sewer for what some saw as its
neighbour's cultural filth. 98

Now the political, anti-capitalist sentiments of the Weimar Republic were
replaced by a resurgent influence of religious organizations in politics and society.
In 1953 a new statute was passed against publications that endangered the morals
of the German youth. Between 1954 and 1956 a series of private initiatives, usually
orchestrated by religious organizations, led to the setting up of public collection
points where trash literature could be swapped for morally improving juvenile
literature. Despite acute awareness of the book-burning predilections of the Nazi
authorities, several pyres of offensive publications were publicly burned or
buried." Hard-boiled detective novels and pornography were the main preoccu-
pation of the moral crusaders but popular literature that encouraged 'superstition'
was also deemed fit for the flames.

The words 'SchuncT and 'Schmutz' may not have found their way into the 1953
law, but they were at the heart of the criticisms of one of the most vocal
campaigners against the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, the respected Austrian
forensic doctor Otto Prokop. In an article written in the early 1960s he thought it
pertinent to list the range of 'trashy' lifestyle books of what he called the 'cynical'
Schmutzliteratur publishers who printed editions of the Moses Books. 100 One of
those he mentioned was the Brunswick publishing house Planet- Verlag. This was
one of the provincial publishers that had been quick to take advantage of the new
realities of post-war Germany, exploiting the undoubted thirst for cheap, escapist
popular literature. It specialized in guides for women on how to look young,
remain desirable, and achieve the perfect bust. 101 More controversially, since the
war, it had been re-publishing the pulp science-fiction tales of Paul Alfred
Mueller, who also wrote under the noms de plume Freder van Hoik and Lok
Myler. Mueller's tales of futuristic, Arian scientific enterprise and colonization of
Atlantis were hugely popular in Nazi Germany. It was this uncomfortable asso-
ciation that led Planet- Verlag to discontinue the re-editions in 1953, in anticipa-
tion of the imminent censorship law. 102 It was not the peddling of rip-roaring
Arian fantasies that landed the publisher in court, however, but rather accusations
of fostering pernicious magical beliefs. In 1950, it had printed 9,000 copies of a
hardback version of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. This was not a version of
the Scheible edition with its numerous pseudo-Hebraic sigils and amulets, but was

254 I Pulp Magic

nevertheless controversial due to its advice on making a pact with the Devil. Nine
thousand was a sizeable print run for the time and Planet- Verlag was obviously
confident it could sell them in large numbers. In other words they were aware of
the thirst for practical magic in post-war Germany. Not long after it also brought
out an edition of Das Buch Jezira to capitalize on their initial success.

In 1954 the German Society for Protection against Superstition, or DEGESA
(Deutsche Gesellschaft Schutz vor Aberglauben) , was founded. As one member put it,
the Society was dedicated to combating 'the commercial exploitation of super-
stition'. 103 It acted as a network for a diverse bunch of campaigners against
grimoires and their influence. There was Will Emrich, a former president of the
German Animal Protection League, who believed the Sixth and Seventh Books of
Moses had led to the painful deaths of numerous cats, chickens, moles, and toads by
followers of its magical cures. 104 Herbert Schafer was more concerned with the
social consequences. He was a criminologist for the West German federal police,
who examined the files of ninety-five court cases involving witchcraft beliefs
between 1925 and 1956, and twenty-nine legal actions against magical healers
between 1947 and 1955. He found the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses was
mentioned in 20 per cent of the cases. Amongst them was that of a hexenhanner
in southern Germany who, since 1941, had been offering to remove evil from
farmers' cattle sheds with the help of his 'Moses books'. 105 The Jesuit priest
Philipp Schmidt concentrated on the religious and moral threat posed by
grimoires. In 1956 he published a book on the evils of magic past and present in
which he exaggeratedly stated that magic books had played their part in nearly all
the recent cases of witchcraft and magic heard by the German courts. They
accounted for the 'almost uniform methods and practices of the "unwitchers" ',
he asserted, and they were 'calculated to have a pernicious effect on simple minds
and on uncritical, credulous persons'. 106 In i960 another Catholic author,
Dr Herbert Auhofer, published a book on the subject, Aberglaube und Hexenwahn
heute (Superstition and the Witch-craze Today), which was apparently officially
praised by the Catholic Church.

All these authors fulsomely applauded one man who had pioneered the
campaign, a man whom Aufhofer said had 'preached to deaf ears' for four decades
and had been unfairly portrayed as a monomaniac for his earnest endeavour. 107
That man was the retired Hamburg schoolteacher Johann Kruse (1889— 1983). As a
farmer's son brought up in Brickeln, Schleswig-Holstein, he had heard people
being accused of witchcraft and seen the suffering and torment it had caused.
Indeed, his own mother was also slandered, leading to much family anxiety.
While most critical attention was focused on the popularity of spiritualism,
theosophy, and other middle-class esoteric interests, Kruse began to wage a lonely
campaign against the old, deeply engrained magical traditions rooted in rural

das ist Moses magiscfae Geisterkunst, da»
Geheitnnis aller Gebeimniaec.

Wortgetreu nach einer then Handvdbrift
Mit alien Holzsdralttea

Fig. 26 The 1950 Planet- Verlag edition of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses.

256 I Pulp Magic

German society. In 1923 he published a book on the subject entitled Hexen-
wahn in der Gegenwart {Witch-craze in the Present). He was infuriated by the
complacency of folklorists, educationalists, and the clergy for treating witchcraft
beliefs as mere folklore and not a serious social menace. It was in the 1930s that he
seriously began to mount a national campaign. Although this fitted quite well with
Nazi ideas about the pernicious influence of ecclesiastical 'superstition', Kruse was
no ardent participant in the Third Reich, and although not actively opposed to the
regime he was nevertheless sufficiently lacking in enthusiasm for it to cause him
some personal trouble. Kruse's ire was chiefly directed at the thousands of
hexenbanner who made large amounts of money by defrauding those who thought
they were bewitched, and who caused untold suffering to those accused of
witchcraft. In 1950 he founded his own Archive for the Investigation of Con-
temporary Witchcraft Superstition. The following year he published a book based
on his extensive collection of cases entitled Hexen unter uns? (Witches Among Us?),
in which he toned down the anti-clericalism of his earlier work. It was his legal
challenge to grimoires a few years later, though, that would make him a figure of
international interest.

Planet- Verlag placed numerous adverts in popular magazines and newspapers
for what was the first widely available German edition of the grimoire for twenty
years. The impact of this advertising campaign was evident at the trial, in 195 1, of
a hexenbanner named Wilhelm Ltihr of Ebersdorf. In defending his trade, which
concerned the selling of celestial letters, Ltihr told the judge that the Sixth and
Seventh Book of Moses was 'openly allowed in the book-trade, and daily extolled in
many newspapers and illustrated magazines'. 09 In 1952 the influence of these
advertisements came to Kruse's attention and a new front of his campaign against
'superstition' opened up. The following year he denounced the Planet- Verlag
edition, alleging that the title page's claim to be a 'Philadelphia' imprint was
fraudulent, and, more importantly, that its magical contents was a public menace
that could potentially encourage murder. 110 In 1956 he took the bold step of suing
the publisher.

Kruse's star expert witness at the trial was Otto Prokop. In his mid-thirties, the
high-flying doctor had become a lecturer at the Forensic Medicine Institute at
Bonn University in 1953, and in early 1957 he was appointed the manager of the
Institute of Judicial Medicine at Humboldt University in East Berlin. Prokop
seems to have first come into contact with Kruse in 1954 via a mutual acquaint-
ance keen to help build on the network of anti-superstition activists fostered by
DEGESA. 111 As well as his innovative work in forensic science, Prokop had
already proved himself an ardent campaigner against magical and spiritual medi-
cine, lecturing on the subject at university and later in several publications. He
denounced alternative medicines such as homeopathy and acupuncture as

Pulp Magic | 257

superstitious, and during his long career he was frequently involved in court cases
against spiritualist healers and other practitioners of alternative medicine. 112 He,
not surprisingly, shared Kruse's disgust for the magical practices of German folk
medicine, and saw the suppression of the Sixth and Seventh Books as a positive step
towards eradicating 'unscientific', 'irrational' medicine.

Planet-Verlag produced its own star academic to counter the Prokop effect —
the well-known professor of folklore at Gottingen University, Will-Erich
Peuckert (1895— 1969). At the time of the trial Peuckert's reputation was at its
peak. Only a year earlier a Festschrift had been published to honour his sixtieth
birthday, with congratulatory signatures from leading folklorists from across
Europe and America. He had not always been in such favour, however.

Like Kruse, Peuckert began his career as a provincial schoolteacher. Brought
up in the mountainous region of Silesia on the German— Czech border, his
industrious research on the popular traditions and beliefs of the region led him
to a career in academia and a post at the University of Breslau. During the 1920s
and 1930s he wrote a series of books on early modern occult philosophy and
mysticism, such as Bohme (1924) and Die Rosenkreutzer (1928). His most ambitious
book was Pansophie (1936), which concerned the development of natural and
demonic intellectual magic during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Peuckert
was labelled as 'politically unreliable' by the Nazi authorities and was stripped of
his post. He retired to the Silesian mountains from where he continued to research
and publish. Untainted by Nazi associations he was the first professor to be
assigned an academic folklore position in post-war West Germany, and was a
leading figure in the soul-searching debate that took place amongst folklorists
regarding their discipline's role during the Third Reich, and how it should
develop in light of its recent history. 113

Peuckert had a deep understanding of the historical and cultural significance of
grimoires. In 1954 he had published an article on the Egyptischen Geheimnisse and
shortly after the Planet-Verlag trial the fruits of his research on the Sixth and
Seventh Books of Moses also appeared. 114 His reputation was such that, like Kruse,
the magic-believing public saw him not only as a scholar of the subject but also a
skilful worker of counter-witchcraft. 5 He received letters from distraught
people asking him to unbewitch them and provide love potions. One farmer
from a remote village in the wild Liineburger Heath, north of Braunschweig,
wrote to him that his cows were bewitched and that reading the Bible in the
cowshed at midnight had failed to remove the spell upon them. Instead of giving
the man a lecture on the fallacy of believing in witchcraft, as Kruse might have
done, Peuckert visited the man and seeing that the stalls were filthy, he said,
Witches hate light and air and cleanliness; clean the place out and they will go.' 116

258 I Pulp Magic

His support for Planet- Verlag was based, in part, on the historical perspective
that the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses provided a fascinating insight into the
origin and reformulation of magical traditions over the centuries. From a folklor-
ist's point of view, furthermore, it had been an important influence on rural
German folk magic for over a century — part of a valuable tradition that should be
understood and preserved, not condemned and suppressed. The prosecution
accused him of romanticizing ignorance and credulity. 117 Peuckert was also,
perhaps, motivated by professional pique. How dare an amateur like Kruse and
a scientist such as Prokop assume expertise on a subject that was the preserve of
historians and folklorists?

Peuckert's enthusiasm for finding value in old magical remedies was most graph-
ically demonstrated by his experiments with hallucinogenic plants, which garnered
international attention in the press a few years later. In i960 the 65-year-old
academic published a brief account of how he and a lawyer friend had concocted
numerous narcotic potions based on early modern magical remedies and spells. He
occasionally tried some of these out on himself, most notably a witches' ointment
described in della Porta's Magia Naturalis. He and his friend rubbed some of the
ointment into their skin and soon entered an hallucinatory alternative world. For
more than a day and a night they dreamed of wild aerial rides and participated in
orgies with grotesque creatures. For Peuckert it was proof that some of those who
said they had been to Sabbats were influenced by their drug-induced alternative
realities. 1 18 As a newspaper report explained, 'Peuckert's research has convinced him
that there is a scientific basis for many things associated with witchcraft.' 1 19 But let us
return to the rather more sober environment of the Braunschweig magistrates' court,
where, in November 1956 the trial came to a head.

Peuckert's testimony failed to convince the lower court, which agreed with
Prokop's contention that the Moses book was harmful and 'a danger to the general
public'. 120 The owners of Planet-Verlag were fined 9,000 deutschmarks and
required to withdraw the remaining stock and the printing plates. They appealed,
and in September the following year the two sides were once again back in court
and in even bitterer mood. Kruse and Prokops garnered the support of Philip
Schmidt and other members of DEGESA. Peuckert was in acerbic form denoun-
cing Kruse's opinions, his book, and his 'useless' archive. The appeals court
rescinded the decision, though legal proceedings rumbled on for another three
years with the higher court launching an investigation as to whether the
publisher's advertisements regarding the origin and contents of the Moses Books
had deceived those lured into buying it. Several purchasers were persuaded to give
testimony, such as the farmer and mechanic who recounted how he had seen a
magazine advertisement for the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, in which it was
stated that it contained valuable old remedies for curing people and animals. He

Pulp Magic | 259

ordered a copy, but on reading it soon realized he could have saved himself some
money, as it was merely a 'catchpenny publication'. He showed it to a local
veterinarian who agreed it was worthless, and so his wife burned it. 121

Finally, in July i960, the court ruled that the publishers should pay a fine
totalling several hundred deutschmarks rather than thousands, but otherwise all
other charges arising from the original prosecution were to be dropped. Kruse had
lost the battle, but the war against the Moses Book was not over. The trial acted as
a spur to others, like Schmidt, Schafer, and Auhofer, to join Kruse's crusade.
Another consequence of the case was the international spotlight it cast on
Germany's 'problem'. Even though, as we have seen, the USA was by now the
leading global purveyor of cheap magic literature, Germany was portrayed in
some quarters as a centre of the market in 'superstition'. In 1957, for instance, a
report in the North American press regarding the prosecution of a female
hexenbanner from Offenburg, stated that, 'German book publishers are making
fortunes by printing short pamphlets and long volumes with instructions for those
wishing to practise or benefit by sorcery.' 122

So far we have seen how concerns over the social influence of the Sixth and
Seventh Books of Moses led to the rather unlikely coalition of those inspired by anti-
clericalism, professional medical hegemony, and Catholic authority. Protestant
participation in the crusade was personified by the industrious Lutheran minister
Kurt Koch (1913-87). While Kruse was battling against the influence of the Sixth
and Seventh Books of Magic in northern Germany, Koch had been orchestrating a
similar campaign against the use of such 'devilish merchandise' in the southern
German province of Baden and neighbouring Switzerland. He fought, he said,
against the 'flood of magical conjuration which washes the Alps'. 123 Koch, whose
theological career began after receiving a revelation from God at the age of 17,
trained for the ministry at the University of Tubingen, and specialized in the
practice of evangelical Christian psychiatry. 124 From the commencement of his
pastoral activities in the 1930s he began to record the instances of magical practices
he and fellow ministers encountered in parts of southern Germany, Switzerland,
and Austria. Over three decades he claimed to have compiled a file containing
thousands of cases of occult disturbance, many of them the result of experiences
with magical healing and grimoires. During the 1960s he wrote a series of books in
German on the perceived occult crisis, and the success of the English translations,
marketed for a popular audience, soon gave him international renown. By the
1970s he was lecturing all over the world on the evils of the occult in the modern
world. He saw himself as leading a Protestant counselling crusade, believing
psychotherapists were failing both religiously and practically to deal with the
mental traumas being caused.

260 I Pulp Magic

Koch shared the same goal as Kruse. He had participated in the Planet-Verlag
trial, and considered Hexen unter uns? one of the most informative works on
contemporary 'superstition'. However, considering Kruse's anti-clerical stance, it
is not surprising that the two campaigners did not share the same interpretation of
folk magic. Koch accused Kruse of 'failing to recognize its true background'. 125
For Koch folk magic was not merely pernicious or foolish superstition. Whether
white or black, it had 'the devil's very own stamp on it'. 126 He recognized that its
continued popularity was because it seemed, in many cases, to have successfully
cured the sick and the victims of witchcraft and spirits, but Satan's hooks left
lasting moral and psychological damage. For the evangelical Koch all this magical
activity had apocalyptic significance: 'an increasing flood of occult movements
tries to overrule the Church of Christ. We live in the last phase of the end of the
age . . . Empowered by this fact we can dare to face all the onslaughts of the
defeated foe.' 127

Koch detected three groups of grimoire owners. There were those who were
aware of the ungodliness of keeping such books and kept them a close secret,
passing their copies on to their eldest sons only on their deathbeds. Those in the
second group confessed their awful secret to their families and requested them to
burn their magic books. During his ministrations many copies had been handed
over to Koch to be destroyed in this way. The most disquieting group consisted of
those, including churchmen, who believed that some grimoires were godly
religious texts, the devilish charms they contained being camouflaged by the use
of Christian words, symbols, and customs. During a large conference of pastors,
for instance, Koch strongly protested when a local conjurer was characterized as a
decent, godly man. How could he be if he practised charming? 128

In 1961 Koch warned that such books 'circulate among people like poisonous
gases, poisoning their very minds and souls'. 129 The Sixth and Seventh Books, in
particular, had 'caused untold harm in the world and people who read it invariably
suffer in the process'. 130 Those who used it were in thrall to the Devil. In evidence
he cited the following case:

At a youth conference a 1 7-year-old lad came to an evangelical meeting
with a New Testament in his left pocket and, bound in similar format, the
6th and 7th book of Moses in his right. My assistant at this meeting took
the 6th and 7th Book of Moses from him. We looked through the magic
book and found that the lad had bound himself to the devil by putting his
signature underneath a picture of Lucifer. We then burned the book. 131

The mere possession of the book was enough to cause misfortune and severe
psychological damage. An ethno-psychiatric study conducted in 1950s Ghana had
suggested that expressions of the intention to practise magic using the Sixth and

Pulp Magic | 261

Seventh Books of Moses 'frequently herald the onset of schizophrenia'. For Koch
the Moses Book was the cause not the symptom of mental illness. 'It is a
remarkable observation of pastoral experience', he observed, 'that in all homes
and families in which the 6th and 7th Book of Moses is kept, or even used,
psychological disturbances of various kinds appear.' 'I have not met one possessor
of the 6th and 7th Book of Moses who had no psychological complications,' he
concluded. One man who used it to charm people and animals died in terrible
pain 'amid the spread of a penetrating odour', even though he had burned his
copy. When the man's sister, who was sceptical about magic, used some of the
formulae in mockery, 'she sensed a change in her emotional equilibrium, became
insane, suffered manic attacks', and ended up in a mental institution. 133 It was
even the cause of many cases of hereditary psychological problems. Indeed this is
how he explained his own childhood experience of terrible nocturnal visions of
diabolic beasts. Kurt's father revealed to him that his great-grandmother had used
the Sixth and Seventh Book of Moses: 'At one stroke I understood the various
coincidences in the experiences of my father and his siblings, and also in my
own childhood. My grandmother, about whom there had been many rumours,
was thus the demon-oppressed daughter of a spell-caster.' 134

How successful was the anti-grimoire campaign in Germany? Could Koch
break the devilish cycle he so graphically demonstrated? Well, perhaps it had a
limited localized influence. An ethnological study of witchcraft in the deep rural
region of central Germany known as Franconian Switzerland noted in the early
1970s that 'While almost all of the older peasants know of the book . . . few have
seen it. I have met only one person who admitted to having seen — indeed used —
the book.' It was suggested that this was due to the success of the Church in
restricting its availability. 135 As we have seen elsewhere, however, the perceived
scarcity of grimoires does not tally with the reality of their easy availability. Koch
and his ilk also had to battle the tidal wave of Western occult interest that surged in
the 1970s. Ultimately Koch would be no more successful than King Cnut. During
the 1970s and 1980s German publishers continued to pump out editions of the
Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses. ' 6 Planet-Verlag reprinted its 1953 edition of Das
Zehnte, Elfte und Zwolfte Buck Moses in the 1970s along with Das sechste bis zwolfte
Buch Moses. Pulp won with a knockout.

Lovecraft, Satan, and Shadows

hile the battle over the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses was being fought in

VV Germany, and as the publications of Gamache and De Claremont spread
across the Caribbean, a new genre of grimoire was brewing in the Anglo-Saxon
world. The merging of fact and fiction had always been an integral aspect of the
grimoire tradition, and in the twentieth century this was given a new twist with
the genre of literary fantasy not only being influenced by the magical tradition but
also inspiring the creation of new grimoires. They also reached a new audience,
attracting the attention of counter-culture movements in the post-war West. As a
consequence they became the basis for new, non-Christian religions whose appeal
stretched far beyond the rarefied, middle-class esotericism of the Golden Dawn
and its offshoots.

Necronomicon

Several Victorian and Edwardian novelists, such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton and
Arthur Machen, who translated Casanova's Memoires, had a personal, practical
interest in magic that fed into their work. Bulwer-Lytton's Zanoni (1842), which
concerned the adventures of a Rosicrucian mage at the time of the French
Revolution, begins with a thinly veiled account ofjohn Denley's occult bookshop
in Covent Garden. In The Column of Dust (1909) by Evelyn Underhill, a one-time
member of the Golden Dawn like Machen, the main character, Constance Tyrrel,
a bookseller's assistant, conjures up a spirit by reciting from 'a rare old English

Lovecraft, Satan, and Shadows | 263

translation of the "Grand Grimoire" '. It is somewhat surprising, then, that the
authors of the two most intriguing fictional grimoires of the early twentieth
century had little practical interest in the magical tradition.

The novelist W. H. Hodgson (1877— 1918) created the first of these modern
grimoires, namely the fourteenth-century Sigsand manuscript. Written in
'ye olde' English, this was the key inspiration for the occult practices of Hodgson's
ghost hunter and private detective, Thomas Carnacki, whose amazing exploits
were recounted in a series of short stories written between 1910 and 1914. For
Carnacki, 'ninety-nine cases in a hundred turn out to be sheer bosh and fancy,'
but the other one per cent brought him face to face with various denizens of the
spirit world. Despite his usual rationalist outlook, Carnacki relies heavily on magic
for protection. In 'The Gateway of the Monster' Carnacki explains to his friends
the nature of his main defence against evil spirits. It was a Solomonic pentacle
drawn within a circle on the floor. Garlic was rubbed around the circle while just
within it he marked out the 'Second Sign of the Saaamaaa Ritual', joining each
with a left-handed crescent, in the valley of which he placed a lighted candle. Five
portions of bread wrapped in linen, and five jars of a 'certain water' were placed
ceremoniously within the pentacle. This 'defence' was taken from the Sigsand
manuscript, and had saved his life — but only just. To strengthen its power he
enhanced the ancient magic with the power of new scientific forces by positioning
vacuum tubes within the pentagram and passing a current through them. 2 Car-
nacki cites brief excerpts from the Sigisand manuscript here and there in the
stories, and its advice constantly frames his understanding of the spirit world and
how to deal with it, but otherwise its contents remain largely a mystery.

Hodgson, the son of a clergyman, had a youthful lust for the sea, and his parents
reluctantly agreed to him signing on for the mercantile marines. After being
bullied by a second mate, Hodgson became an early adherent of judo and body-
building, and when his nautical career came to an end he set up a school of
physical culture in Blackburn. It was when his school closed down in 1902 that he
turned to a career writing tales of the fantastic. He enlisted in 1914, was decom-
missioned after an injury on active service in 1916, and then re-enlisted in 1917.
He was killed near Ypres in April 1918. 3 Hodgson was certainly an enthusiastic
photographer, which may have led to an interest in spiritual investigation, but
otherwise there is nothing in his brief and tragic biography to indicate any deep
interest in the occult. But there is no reason to suggest that his interest in grimoires
was anything but casual. After all, the author of the most enduring and influential
fictional grimoire, the Necromonicon, likewise had little initial knowledge of the
subject.

The childhood of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890— 1937), the son of a sales
representative from Rochester, New York, was not the happiest either. In 1 893

264 I Lovecraft, Satan, and Shadows

his father went insane while they were staying at a Chicago hotel. He was
hospitalized and died five years later. Thereafter, Howard was brought up by his
mother and her father. A precocious and voracious reader, Lovecraft's imagin-
ation was stoked by the eclectic contents of his grandfather's library, and he
developed a dual passion for modern science and old traditions and beliefs,
devouring the Thousand and One Nights, Grimm's fairy tales, and Greek and
medieval mythology. Yet, Lovecraft had no interest in merely regurgitating
existing folklore and mythologies in his own fiction; rather he advocated using
the corpus to create 'new artificial myths'. 4 He became skilled at inventing
traditions, creating a verisimilitude of folklore.

Most of Lovecraft's fiction was published in the pulp fantasy and horror
magazine Weird Tales. For many years after his death Lovecraft's work was not
taken seriously as literature because it was published in such pulp publications, but
now 'he has become an icon in popular culture in part because his work appeared
there.' 5 Grimoires were a favourite motif for the writers of pulp horror and
fantasy. In a letter written in 1936 Lovecraft listed some of the 'terrible and
mysterious books so darkly mentioned in weird magazine stories'. 6 Among
them was Robert E. Howard's Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Howard, who is best
known for his creation Conan the Barbarian, described the first edition of
Unaussprechlichen Kulten as appearing in Dtisseldorf in 1839 — a nice touch echoing,
whether knowingly or not, the publication of the Horst and Scheible libraries of
the occult. Robert Bloch, who would later pen the bestseller Psycho, invented the
De Vermis Mysteriis, a magic book owned by an alchemist and necromancer named
Ludvig Prinn burned at the stake in Brussels during the late fifteenth or early
sixteenth century. Prinn, who claimed to have lived for several centuries, said he
gained his knowledge from Syrian wizards while captive during the Crusades.
Incomplete fragments of The Book of Eibon, invented by Clark Ashton Smith,
contained magical formulae and accounts of the exploits of the ancient wizard
Eibon, and were said to exist in English, French, and Latin translations. 7 The
community of horror and fantasy authors freely appropriated these creations at the
time. Lovecraft made reference to and had a hand in developing the mythology of
all three of the above examples, but it was his own addition to the corpus that
went on to have the most enduring influence.

Lovecraft's first reference to the Necronomicon — the name was probably inspired
by Marcus Manilius's astrological poem Astronomica — was in a story called 'The
Hound', written in 1922 and published in Weird Tales in 1924. 8 The story
concerns a couple of grave-digging, relic hunters bent on finding ever more
items for their private museum of blasphemous 'universal terror' — a collection
which already contained the Necronomicon. They travel to Holland to plunder the

Lovecraft, Satan, and Shadows | 265

grave of a medieval mage. In his coffin they find a curious jade amulet with strange
inscriptions carved on the base:

Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced
readers know, but we recognised it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred . . . All too well did we
trace the sinister lineaments described by the old Arab daemonologist;
lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifest-
ation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the dead. 9

The Necromonicon popped up again in 'The Festival', written a year later and
published in Weird Tales in 1925, which was inspired by Lovecraft's recent reading
of Margaret Murray's The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, the wider influence of
which I shall come back to shortly. The narrator is compelled by his ancestors to
visit the fictional New England town of Kingsport one snowy Yuletide. In 1692
four of his kinsmen had been hanged for witchcraft just outside the town. His
destination is the house of an old, mute gentleman. He is shown into a dark, dank
candle-ht room where on a table there lay a pile of 'hoary and mouldy' books.
Amongst them were the 'terrible Saducismus Triumphatus of Joseph Glanvill,
published in 1681, the shocking Daemonolatreia of Remigius, printed in 1595 at
Lyons, and worst of all the unmentionable Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul
Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius' forbidden Latin translation'. 10 The first two books
are real, and the last not.

It is possible that the Sigsand manuscript may have been the seed for Lovecraft's
Necronomicon. Lovecraft had great respect for Hodgson's work, writing in an essay
on 'Supernatural Horror in Literature' that 'Few can equal him in adumbrating
the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities through casual
hints and insignificant details, or in conveying feelings of the spectral and the
abnormal.' 11 He was less than thrilled by Hodgson's conception of Carnacki's
magical defences, though, stating that 'scenes and events [are] badly marred by an
atmosphere of professional "occultism."' Lovecraft was more inclined towards
Algernon Blackwood's stories about the investigations of the 'Psychic Doctor'
John Silence, which were undoubtedly also an inspiration for Hodgson. Silence
despised the word 'occultism' and his powers are those unleashed by the power of
thought rather than the ritual, magical trappings employed by Carnacki.

Over the next couple of years the mysterious, notorious Necronomicon cropped
up tantalizingly here and there in several other short stories. Like Hodgson and
the Sigsand manuscript, Lovecraft made appetizingly few references to the
Necronomicon, and so the exact nature of its contents is never clear to the reader.
Was it a source of mystical secrets, a demonological disquisition, or a book of
practical magic? In 1927 Lovecraft decided to clarify in his own mind what it was

266 | Lovecraft, Satan, and Shadows

by constructing a brief 'history' of its existence to ensure that there was some
consistency in his future references to it. According to this history, a mad Yemeny
poet named Abdul Alhazred penned the Al Azif, or Necronomicon as it came to be
known, during the early eighth century ad. His wisdom was accrued through his
visits to the ruins of Babylon, the subterranean chambers of Memphis, and a
solitary spiritual sojourn in the Arabian Desert. As a twelfth-century biographer
recounted, through his experiences Alhazred had discovered the existence of
a secret race of beings older than Man, entities whom he began to worship and
called Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu. It was in ad 950 that the Al Azif was secretly
translated into Greek under the title Necronomicon, copies of which were sought
and destroyed by the Church. Some escaped their attentions and in 1228 Olaus
Wormius translated it into Latin. Though quickly banned by Pope Gregory IX,
one edition of it was printed in Germany during the fifteenth century and another,
probably in Spain, two centuries later. A Greek edition was printed in Italy
between 1500 and 1550. The last copy of the latter was found and burned in
Salem in 1692. John Dee made a translation that only survives in fragments.
Existing Latin versions are kept in the British Library, the Bibliotheque Nationale,
Harvard, the University of Buenos Aires, and Miskatonic University Library,
Arkham (one of Lovecraft's creations).

This invented history is a prime example of Lovecraft's 'artificial' myth-
making, weaving real people, such as Wormius (actually a seventeenth-century
Danish physician), Gregory, and Dee, and real events, such as the Salem witch
trials, into a realistic sounding history that mimicked the bogus traditions that
clung to real grimoires. What inspired it? Lovecraft's knowledge of occult history
was surprisingly limited during the 1920s. 12 His main source of information was
the entry on 'magic' in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Indeed in 1925 he admitted to
an acquaintance that he was 'appallingly ignorant' on such matters. 'Are there any
good translations of any mediaeval necromancers with directions for raising spirits,
invoking Lucifer, & all that sort of thing?', he asked. 13 Lovecraft had little interest
in the vibrant folk traditions of the present and so seems to have been completely
unaware of the popularity of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses amongst
America's working classes. There is also no evidence that he knew of the
Picatrix, which would at first glance seem to be the obvious inspiration for the
history of the Necromonicon. The Arabic context was evidently inspired primarily
by his passion for the Arabian Nights and Vathek, William Beckford's eighteenth-
century Gothic Arabian tale of magic. 14 As we have seen with regard to the
Shriners, at the time Lovecraft was writing there was also considerable American
fascination with legends of rediscovered ancient Arabic mystical knowledge.
In 1936, when his knowledge on the subject had certainly improved, he mused
that a mix of scraps of medieval European and Near Eastern rituals and

Lovecraft, Satan, and Shadows | 267

incantations for summing spirits, 'such as A. E. Waite and "Eliphas Levi" repro-
duce', would 'constitute something vaguely like what the Necromonicon and its
congeners are supposed to be'. 13

It is possible that Lovecraft's interest in mysterious occult books, and that of
his fellow writers of weird tales, was also influenced by the public interest in and
controversy over the Voynich manuscript. 16 In 1912 the political emigre and
London book dealer Wilfred Michael Voynich came across a highly unusual
illuminated manuscript in a wooden chest in the remote Jesuit castle of Villa
Mondragone in Frascati, Italy: at least that was the version of its discovery that
circulated after his death. In his own lifetime he only divulged that he had found it
in a castle or monastery in southern Europe. Not long after his arrival in England,
after fleeing Siberian exile, Voynich accrued a reputation in the trade for his ability
to uncover unknown and lost books. Part of his success was due to the periodic
tours he made across Europe visiting impoverished religious establishments. One
of the medieval manuscripts he found appeared, at first glance, to be an astrological
herbal not unlike numerous others of the period. However, this one was written
in an unknown cipher and contained numerous naked, bathing female figures.
Even more curiously none of the plants illustrated were obviously identifiable.
Voynich displayed it to English and French scholars before moving to America in
1914. Several years later he had photostatic copies made of some of the pages and
sent them to American and European academics. They soon attracted controversy
and intrigue.

Voynich believed his mysterious book to be of the thirteenth century and
suspected that its author might have been none other than Albertus Magnus or
Roger Bacon. He also reckoned he had found evidence that the manuscript had
been in the ownership ofjohn Dee, who subsequently sold it to Rudolf II. In 1921
the scholar William Newbold announced that he had been able to decipher parts
of the manuscript, and confirmed that its author was indeed Roger Bacon.
Voynich capitalized on this sensational endorsement and put the manuscript up
for sale for $160,000 — over two million dollars in today's money. The controversy
surrounding it meant, however, that no library or collector was willing to pay
anything near this price. Doubts about Newbold's claim were widespread, and
in 1929 the pioneering historian Lynn Thorndike, who would go on to complete
a monumental eight-volume history of magic and early science, dismissed
Voynich's 'pet' manuscript as 'an anonymous manuscript of dubious value'. 17 It
remained unsold until a New York book dealer paid out $24,500 for it not long
after the death of Voynich's wife. The dealer hoped to make a killing on this now
notorious manuscript, but ended up donating it to Yale University in 1969. There
was too much suspicion surrounding it. If, as it has been suggested, it was an
historical hoax perpetrated by Edward Kelley to fleece John Dee, then it would

268 | Lovecraft, Satan, and Shadows

still have considerable historical curiosity value. Others, including myself, suspect,
however, that it was a modern hoax perpetrated by or on Voynich.

A few months before he died Lovecraft wrote to a friend, 'If the Necronomicon
legend continues to grow, people will end up believing in it.' 8 By 1936 someone
had, as a prank, advertised that copies were available for $1.49. Lovecraft suspected
Robert Bloch. The idea of writing a Necromonicon certainly appealed to Lovecraft,
and he expressed the wish that he would have 'the time and imagination to assist
in such a project'. Yet, at the same time, he felt that no such publication would be
as 'terrible and impressive' as that which could be hinted at. It would have to run
to more than a thousand pages to simulate what he had already described, and so
he thought that he could only feasibly achieve the 'translation' of certain passages
of the book. Ultimately though, he opined, 'I am opposed to serious hoaxes, since
they really confuse and retard the sincere student of folklore. I feel quite guilty
every time I hear of someone's having spent valuable time looking up the
Necronomicon at public libraries.' 1 '' Others were less conscientious.

Over the decades several authors have claimed to have discovered manuscript
versions, and in the 1980s one magician even claimed to have in his possession a
4,000-year-old grimoire from which the Necronomicon derived. People now
practise 'Lovecraftian' magic. -0 The most successful of the print editions was the
Simon Necronomicon, a ninth-century Greek text discovered by monks and
brought to America in the 1970s by an Eastern Orthodox bishop named Simon.
The first 'translated' edition appeared in a limited, leather-bound edition of 666
copies. Subsequent hardback and paperback reprints went on to sell in their many
thousands. The Simon Necronomicon is a well-constructed hoax. Its contents have
been stitched together from printed sources on Mesopotamian myth and magic,
and its supposed discovery by monks is a well-worn motif in grimoire history. But
as a piece of magical literature it, and other Necronomicons, are no less 'worthy' than
their predecessors. Like other famous grimoires explored in this book, it is their
falsity that makes them genuine. 21 The concern Lovecraft expressed about the
blurring of fact and fiction regarding the Necronomicon, and the potential for
confusing the earnest student of the occult, was born out with much greater
consequence with the founding text of modern witchcraft.

The Book of Shadows

In his short story 'The Grimoire', published in 1936, Montague Summers
(1880— 1948) created the Mysterium Arcanum, or to give its full title, The Secret
Mystery, or the Art of Evoking Evil Spirits with certain other Most Curious and Close
Matters. The story tells of how a book collector of agnostic persuasion, Dr Julian

Lovecraft, Satan, and Shadows | 269

Hodsoll, purchases the Mysterium from an antiquarian book dealer for five guineas.
It was published in the early seventeenth century and, like numerous printed
grimoires, bore the imprint 'Rome'. Hodsoll's experienced eye recognizes that
this place of publication could not be true. As he informs the book dealer, the
contents 'sound appetizing enough, but it may only be a hash-up of the Petit
Albert and that wretched Pope Honorius.' 22 Hodsoll visits his learned friend
Canon Spenlow and shows him his latest acquisition. Spenlow quickly realizes
the evil, satanic nature of its contents. He recommends that the Mysterium should
be burned, but Hodsoll's curiosity gets the better of him. That night, he translates
one of its conjurations, 'A most Powerful and Efficacious Evocation', reading it
through softly to himself. Shortly after, a strange servant enters the room and asks,
'You wanted me, sir' before being dismissed. Over the next few days several
uncanny occurrences are experienced in the Canon's house. Fortunately a friend
of Spenlow's, a Dominican friar named Father Raphael, an expert on the Dark
Arts, pays a visit and is on hand when the mysterious servant reveals his satanic
identity and attacks Hodsoll, who had unwittingly summoned him. Raphael
banishes the devil, making 'swift sacred sigils in the air and spoke certain Latin
words of might'. The story ends with the cautionary coda that the once agnostic
Hodsoll sees the error of his ways and becomes a Carmelite priest.

Now, there is definitely something of Montague Summers in the character of
Hodsoll. 23 He was a larger-than-life figure who studied theology at Oxford
University and was ordained a Deacon of the Anglican Church in 1908. Shortly
after, he was charged and acquitted of pederasty. This, along with rumours
regarding his interest in Satanism and the occult, cut short his clerical career.
The following year he converted to Catholicism, and although he liked to give
the impression that he was a priest — calling himself Reverend, conducting private
masses, wearing the Carmelite scapular — there is no evidence he was officially
ordained. He made a living by pursuing a writing career based on his interest in
witchcraft, demonology, Restoration drama, and Gothic literature. As his erudite,
populist books The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1926) and Witchcraft and
Black Magic (1945) show, unlike the creator of the Necromonicon, Summers was
widely read in the history and content of grimoires. Where he departed from most
other historians of the period was that he truly believed that covens of Devil-
worshipping witches, who made pacts with their master, had existed in the past
and continued to do so secretly in the present. He consequently thoroughly
endorsed the witch trials of the early modern period. Summers believed grimoires
were an essential link in the perpetuation and promotion of diabolism, providing
the means to call up the Devil, describing them as 'abominable', 'vile', and
'dangerous'. We hear Summers' voice when Hodsoll's wonders, 'Could it be
that the mysterious book of the witches had fallen into his hands, that volume

270 I Lovecraft, Satan, and Shadows

which was mentioned in more than one trial of the seventeenth century, but
which apparently had never been seen by any who was not a member of that
horrid society?' 24 What, then, would he have made of the Book of Shadows'?

In the 1950s a new religion called Wicca emerged in Britain. Its founder was
Gerald Gardner (1884-1964), a manager and civil servant in the colonial Far East
who retired to England in the mid-i930s. He had an active interest in spiritualism,
Eastern mysticism, folklore, and Freemasonry, and steeped himself in the writings
of Charles Leland and Aleister Crowley, and the theories of Margaret Murray
(1863— 1963). It was the latter who inspired Gardner's belief that many of the tens
of thousands of people tried and executed for witchcraft in early modern Europe
were not Devil worshippers, as Summers believed, but members of an ancient
pagan religion that had survived centuries of Christian persecution. In The Witch
Cult in Western Europe (1921), and in subsequent publications, Murray, who was a
respected Egyptologist, argued that what the medieval Church denounced as
witchcraft was, in fact, the beliefs and practices of a prehistoric fertility cult
based around the worship of a horned God. She arrived at this conclusion by
the highly selective and misleading use of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
confessions concerning witches' Sabbats, most of which were obtained through
torture. Murray thought that this remnant ancient pagan religion finally suc-
cumbed to the weight of persecution sometime in the eighteenth century.

Gardner remarked that he 'did not think that anyone, with the exception of the
Revd Montague Summers, dared hint that there might be anything in witchcraft
to-day without being laughed at'. -6 Nevertheless, Gardner claimed that in 1939
he had discovered and been initiated into a coven of secret pagan worshippers in
the New Forest, Hampshire. Murray's witch cult had survived! He recalled later
that, as a member of the Folklore Society and the Society for Psychical Research,
he had wanted to announce this amazing discovery to the learned community.
But coven members resisted. They were not afraid of being laughed at though.
' "The Age of Persecution is not over," they told me; "give anyone half a chance
and the fires will blaze up again." ' 27 He was only permitted to describe their
existence in fictional terms, and so in 1949 he produced a novel about the witch
cult, High Magic's Aid, which was set in the distant past. It was only in 1954 and the
appearance of his book Witchcraft Today that Gardner went public and Wicca was
truly born.

According to Gardner the rituals and wisdom of the ancient witch cult had
survived — only just — thanks to their being recorded in a grimoire known as the
Book of Shadows. Copies were passed down through covens from one generation
to the next. The nature of this grimoire began to be revealed by Gardner, who had
received his own copy after his initiation, and was subsequently developed with
input from one of his first followers Doreen Valiente, who would later provide a

Lovecraft, Satan, and Shadows | 271

thoughtful self-reflexive history of the movement. Although pirated versions of
the Book of Shadows began to appear in print from the 1960s onwards, Gardner had
produced a manuscript version in the late 1940s entitled 'Ye Bok of ye Art
Magical'. 28 It had the air of a venerable grimoire, with its leather cover, ornate
scripts, and spelling mistakes indicative of repeated copying over the gener-
ations. 29 But the contents seemed suspiciously familiar to those who analysed it
carefully. Could this grimoire really hold the mysteries of an ancient religion?

If 'Ye Bok', and the later Book of Shadows copied and passed on by the original
members of Gardner's own initiates, was not copied from the New Forest coven,
then what source or sources did he draw upon? A perusal of Gardner's library
reveals some texts already well known to the reader. There were, of course, the
works of A. E. Waite and other members of the Golden Dawn, as well as a
manuscript of the 'Grimoire of Honorius'. We also find copies of Henri
Gamache's Long Lost 8th, gth and 10th books of Moses (1948), Gamache's Terrors of
the Evil Eye Exposed (1946), and de Claremont's 7 Keys to Power (1940). Gardner
had probably purchased these Dorene publications during a visit to his brother in
America in the winter of 1947-8. While there he may also have read a short story
by Lovecraft's friend Clark Ashton Smith, which was published in Weird Tales in
1947. This tale of wizardry referred to a magical knife known as the 'arthame', and
in Gardner's grimoire we find a ritual knife called 'athame'. Smith did not invent
the word, but it is possible that Gardner may have been inspired by his use of it. 31

Gardner acknowledged that in writing High Magic's Aid he borrowed heavily
from rituals contained in Mathers' homogenous version of the Greater Key of
Solomon. He told acquaintances that he resorted to copying its examples of 'Jewish
Ritual Magic' partly as a matter of expediency, and also to respect the wishes of his
coven members that he should not publish the 'real' rituals of their prehistoric
religion. 32 In defence of the notion that the Book of Shadows was not completely
Gardner's invention, one Wiccan historian has made the good point that as
Mathers' Key of Solomon was printed in 1888 it could have seeped into English
folk magic and been adopted by the New Forest coven prior to Gardner's
supposed initiation. 33 As this Wiccan author notes, and as has been demonstrated
in this book, printed grimoires infused remarkably quickly into oral magical
traditions. But the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that Ye Bok' and the
Book of Shadows were purely Gardner's work, drawn primarily from the Key of
Solomon, Aleister Crowley's books, which were in turn reliant on Golden Dawn
texts, and Charles Leland's Aradia. 34

Gardner was a show-off and not averse to embroidering the truth. He styled
himself a 'Dr' though he never wrote a PhD. 35 It is hardly a shocking revelation
that he invented the existence of the New Forest coven and therefore fabricated
the history of the Book of Shadows, though it has taken considerable meticulous

272 | Lovecraft, Satan, and Shadows

research to convince some of his adherents. Yet in creating the Book of Shadows
Gardner was merely following the long tradition of grimoire formulation, making
false attributions, providing false histories, and compiling spells and rituals from
unacknowledged sources. In this sense the Book of Shadows has both a venerable
history and legitimacy in magical tradition. Furthermore, he produced the first
'pagan' grimoire in more than a millennium — even if its contents were based on
Judaic and Christian magic. As well as numerous versions of the Book of Shadows,
Wicca has inspired a profusion of other neo-pagan ritual and spell books, and their
production shows no sign of diminishing. These days most pagan witches are
aware of Gardner's fabrications and accept that their religion is not part of a
continuous tradition.

For many, the Book of Shadows is not a Bible, a founding religious text from
which one should not deviate. It is, instead, adapted, and personalized according
to practitioners' interests, creativity, and needs. As a consequence, the manuscript
tradition continues as an important aspect of modern magical practice. 6 Like the
scrapbook grimoires of some cunning-folk, Books of Shadows are part manual, part
diary, and part guide to spiritual or physical well being. Furthermore, book
knowledge more generally is central to the creation and spread of neo-paganism
in all its various forms: it is born of a literary rather than an oral heritage. As a study
of American paganism in the 1980s observed, 'a common feature in the life stories
of American witches is that the concepts of the belief system are first contacted on
the library shelf.' Around the same time a study of British Wiccans noted that,
before their initiation, Wiccans were typically avaricious readers of fantasy and
science fiction. They then progressed to reading about magic, tarot, astrology,
and the supernatural, and after several years in the 'craft' their libraries on related
subjects extended above a hundred volumes. 37 The enthusiasm for reading
around the subject of witchcraft has also led to scholarly historical and anthropo-
logical books acting as source material and being incorporated into the conceptual
and ritual basis of neo-pagan practice. 38

Satan's Bible?

The Satanic Bible completes our triptych of iconic modern grimoires, and was in
part a reaction to the Book of Shadows. Its author was the showman and entertain-
ing liar Anton Szandor LaVey. Howard Stanton Levey, as his birth certificate
records his name, was born in April 1930, the son of a Chicago salesman. The
family moved to San Francisco shortly after his birth and nothing of particular
profundity seems to have happened in his life until he dropped out of high school
and self-consciously immersed himself in the romantically seedy environment of

Lovecraft, Satan, and Shadows | 273

pool halls and gambling dens. He eked out a living playing the organ in nightclubs
while instructing himself in the history and practice of the occult arts. His reading
seems to have consisted mostly of populist works on witchcraft by the likes of
W. B. Seabrook and Montague Summers, along with A. E. Waite's books on
magic. 39 LeVey began to shape his occult persona, influenced by the fictional
character of Stanton Carlisle in William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 noir pulp novel
Nightmare Alley, which was turned into a film starring Tyrone Power. Gresham
was fascinated with freak shows, stage magic, and spiritualism, writing several
non-fiction books on the subject. 40 His interests fed directly into the depiction of
the rise and fall of Stan Carlisle, a carny con-artist clairvoyant who sets up his own
spiritualist movement to fleece the well-to-do. Anyone who has read the book
can see its influence on LaVey's fabricated biography of his misanthropic adven-
tures in the world of carnival life and strip joints. 41 Like many self-proclaimed
masters of the occult before him, LaVey claimed gypsy ancestry — this time from a
Transylvanian-born grandmother. She fuelled his imagination with accounts of
the magical beliefs of her homeland. Another more recent occult tradition he
tapped into in his fictitious biography concerned the rumours regarding Third
Reich occultism. He claimed to have visited Germany with an uncle in 1945
during which he saw secret Nazi horror films that contained depictions of occult
rituals. 42

During the early 1960s LaVey set himself up as an expert on the Black Arts in
San Francisco, giving lectures on a diverse array of subjects from the Black Mass to
ghosts and werewolves. He became something of a local celebrity and his Magical
Circle soirees attracted the likes of the filmmaker and writer Kenneth Anger. It
was in 1966 that LaVey underwent the physical transformation that turned him
into a national media figure. He shaved his head and donned a black clerical collar,
which along with his carefully arched eyebrows and goatee beard, gave him a
theatrical satanic appearance — one befitting the self-styled High Priest of his
newly formed Church of Satan.

For the Church to be taken seriously rather than a mere publicity stunt, LaVey
now had to devise some sort of founding text that would describe and define his
philosophy and belief system. Two years later, LaVey and his wife had only come
up with a short mimeograph 'introduction to Satanism', an assortment of brief
polemical essays and a handout to new members on conducting ritual magic. 43
Considering his love of publicity, the idea of producing a paperback book for the
mass market was surprisingly not LaVey's. It was written at the suggestion of Peter
Mayer, an editor at Avon Books — a major publisher of pulp fiction and comics,
and, later, Simon's Necronomicon. 44 In 1967 Ira Levin's novel Rosemary's Baby,
about a young pregnant woman living in a sinister New York apartment who
believes she is going to give birth to the son of Satan, had become a sensational

274 I Lovecraft, Satan, and Shadows

bestseller. Mayer, having seen some of the press reports about the Church of Satan
contacted the LaVeys and suggested they write a 'Satanic Bible' to capitalize on
the success of Levin's novel and the film adaptation that came out a year later.
Whether pressured by publishing deadlines, or lacking ideas on how to go about
writing a sufficiently thick book of the Church's philosophy, the Satanic Bible,
which came out in January 1970, consisted of the corpus of mimeographs they
had already produced, bulked out with a mish-mash of other texts, including
a plagiarized extract from an obscure social Darwinist political tract published
in 1896, and an adapted version of Crowley's version of the 'Enochian Keys' of
John Dee.

Considering its patchwork construction, the Satanic Bible has a surprising
coherence. It soon becomes quite clear, though, that despite the Church's
name, LaVey's own playful appearance, and the media hoo-hah, the Satanic
Bible does not advocate Devil worship at all, let alone sacrifice. Satan is a symbol
of revolt against Christian hypocrisy and societal authority. Satanism is about the
worship of the self, of the identity and potency of the individual. Theatrical
magical rituals are employed to release and enhance these processes. The Satanic
Bible is essentially a rejection of the supernatural. The only thing new about its
philosophy was, LaVey stated frankly, 'the formal organisation of a religion based
on the universal traits of man'. 45 'Why call it Satanism? Why not call it something
like "Humanism"?', he questioned. The answer: 'Humanism is not a religion. It is
simply a way of life with no ceremony or dogma. Satanism has both ceremony and
dogma.' 46 As Michael Aquino, an early member of the Church and one of its
historians commented, if it was not for its existential appeal to the authority of Satan
the Satanic Bible could be seen as 'merely a social tract by Anton LaVey . . .just
one more i96os'-counterculture-cynic atop a soap-box.' 47

You do not sell an estimated 700,000 or more books, as the Satanic Bible is
thought to have done since 1970, inspire translations into Czech, Swedish, and
German, and generate illegal editions in Mexico and Russia, without having
conjured up a winning recipe. 48 Over the years there have never been more
than a few thousand practising Satanists in the USA and Europe, and some of these
belong to other Satanist groups, such as the Temple of Set. So, who has been
buying the Satanic Bible in such large numbers and why? 49 It obviously appealed to
rebellious teenagers. A 1992 survey of adolescent Satanism in America observed
how some high school students conspicuously carried the Satanic Bible around,
aping Christian fundamentalist teenagers who made show of their pocket Bibles. 50
A respondent in another survey wrote: 'My step-father used to be a Christian
preacher. After being told my choices in clothing, music, art, poetry, etc.
were Satanic, I decided to buy the Satanic Bible to see if it was as bad as he made
it out to be.' 51

Lovecraft, Satan, and Shadows | 275

People have also been lured into buying it, expecting it to be something that it
is not — an espousal of ritual satanic worship. Media reporting enhanced its
reputation as a modern day Devil's book. Just as in early-twentieth-century
Pennsylvania the press and local authorities saw the influence of the Sixth and
Seventh Books of Moses behind every strange murder, so in the 1970s and 1980s
media scares linked teenage suicides with the ownership of the Satanic Bible and
listening to heavy metal music. 52 As early as 1971 an article in the Church of
Satan's bulletin The Cloven Hoof complained that on various occasions the Satanic
Bible had reportedly been found 'at or near the scene of some crime against
society', and the finger of blame had been pointed at the Church of Satan, even
though the vast majority of owners of the book were not actually members. 53

It has been suggested that the Satanic Bible, with its list of infernal names and its
invocations in a mystical language, indicate that the contents of the Sixth and
Seventh Books of Moses influenced LaVey. 54

But the presentation of the two works differs markedly. There is a complete
lack of occult signs, seals, and tables in the Satanic Bible; yet these were essential
ingredients of the Moses Book. Still, the one occult symbol depicted in the Satanic
Bible, which also appeared on the cover — the Sigil of Bap hornet — was crucial to
its commercial success. The symbol consists of a goat-headed Satan framed within
a pentacle, surrounded by two concentric circles containing five Hebraic figures,
which, as LaVey explained, constituted a Kabbalistic spelling of 'Leviathan'. 55 On
the front cover the symbol is coloured purple against a simple black background.
The effect is striking and bound to attract the curious, and sensation seekers and
those intrigued by the prospects of Devil worship.

The Church of Satan recendy conducted its own research into the origin of the
symbol and found its first depiction in Stanislas de Guaita's La clef de la magie noire
(1 897) . However, it was a reprint of the image in white against a black background
for the hardback cover of a popular Pictorial History of Magic and the Supernatural,
published in 1964, which inspired LaVey. While the Satanic Bible was being
written, LaVey had a new version of the symbol created with minor changes.
This became the logo for the Church of Satan and was successfully registered as
a trademark in 1983. 36 The key significance of the Sigil of Baphomet, from
a publishing point of view, is that in the popular imagination it conjures up
expectations of Devil worship, black magic, and sacrifice: it creates 'a sense of
mystery that can only be dispelled by purchasing and reading the book.' 37 So, many
of its readers must have experienced the same sensations of aroused expectations
and disappointment as, say, the Danish purchasers of Gamle Richards Swartkonst-bok
or Feliks Markiewicz's vaunted Seventh Book of Moses.

There are elements of the grimoire format in the Satanic Bible, and the media
and Christian critics have portrayed it as a book of evil black magic a la the Sixth

Fig. 27 Sigil of Baphomet from Stanislas de Guaita's La Clef de la Magie Noire (1897).

Lovecraft, Satan, and Shadows | 277

and Seventh Books of Moses, but LaVey was openly dismissive of the whole genre.
As he wrote in the preface:

This book was written because, with very few exceptions, every tract and
paper, every 'secret' grimoire, all the 'great works' on the subject of
magic, are nothing more than sanctimonious fraud — guilt-ridden ram-
blings and esoteric gibberish by chroniclers of magical lore unable or
unwilling to present an objective view of the subject. 58

In an article in an early edition of The Cloven Hoof, LaVey expanded on this
statement, recalling how at the age of 12 he had started to read Albertus Magnus and
the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, both of which, he remarked, could be
obtained 'in paper before they were called paperbacks'. Even at this tender
age he claimed he 'grew disenchanted' with their contents. 'It occurred to me
there must be "deeper stuff," so I delved.' However, he found the deeper stuff
also constituted an 'ersatz hunk of baloney'. 60 LaVey dismissed the magical
writings of Crowley as the work of 'a poseur par excellence', and was withering
in his comments on Wiccans. 61 He nevertheless borrowed and prospered from the
renewed interest in magical traditions that they had generated. His follow-up
blockbuster Satanic Rituals was more explicitly magical, being a self-acknowledged
ragbag of magical traditions — 'a blend of Gnostic, Cabbalistic, Hermetic, and
Masonic elements', with a dash of Lovecraft. 62

LaVey's works have spawned a whole new generation of diabolic grimoires
that are explicitly satanic. Amongst them is Michael W. Ford's Luciferian Witchcraft
(2005), which, echoing the eighteenth-century Grand grimoire, promises 'a talis-
manic text which presents the medieval concepts of the Black Book being a
conjuration itself of the Devil', and contains the added spice of 'forbidden sex
magick'. There is also the Demonic Bible (2006), which began life on the Internet,
and which divulges numerous rituals for conjuring up demons. It is advertised as
possibly being 'the most evil book written'. LaVey would probably have been
disgusted, amused, and not a little flattered.

Epilogue

Much has been written about the Internet heralding the death of the book. As we
all become habituated to reading from electronic screens, so the argument goes,
print will be usurped by the digital media. The act of writing has certainly been
transformed, with the keyboard replacing pen and ink as our main means of
putting words on a page. But the book is proving to be resilient and adaptable to
the digital age. There is every reason to believe it will continue to play an
important role in shaping our world. The book is a companion, an instant portal
into other worlds, times, and fantasies. Flipping open a laptop or a multimedia
phone and pressing the on button clearly has its own thrill, but the physical
pleasure of handling books and turning their pages, of book marking or annotating
them, is integral to the absorption and anticipation that a fascinating read inspires.
The electronic media is about the here and now, while the book has a venerable
history that you share every time you turn the page. Generation after generation
has done the same thing. These sensual qualities of the book are essential to the
grimoire experience. Those who owned grimoires in the past had a personal
relationship with them that went beyond mere ownership. They were added to
and annotated, and some even gave their blood to enhance the magic they
contained. Some gave their lives.

The history of grimoires, as told in these pages, is not only about the signifi-
cance of the book in human intellectual development, but also about the desire for
knowledge and the enduring impulse to restrict and control it. In this respect the
Internet has had a profound and democratic influence. We have seen how in the
past the authorities struggled to control print, and today the main battleground
over political and religious freedom in undemocratic countries is centred on
attempts to control the Internet, to set up virtual borders in cyberspace. The
fear of magic has dissipated, of course, though it still remains. Evangelicals have
burned Harry Potter books, and Delaurence publications are still banned in
Jamaica. But otherwise the Internet now allows billions to have easy access to
the magic that two millennia of censorship tried to suppress. Yet, as the continued
publication of old and new grimoires across Europe and the Americas shows,

Epilogue | 279

people want to possess as well as read them. The old bond between magic, writing,
and the page has been maintained, and shows no sign of being dissolved.

The final stage in the democratization of grimoires, while connected to the
development of new media, is more about social liberation. It has taken over 2,000
years, but women are finally a major force in both the production and the use of
grimoires. As in other areas of modern cultural and economic life, this can be
traced to the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the rise of feminism and women's
central role in the Western counterculture. The goddess worship at the heart of
the new religion of Wicca had a potent symbolic attraction to women seeking
magical and spiritual empowerment. It is no surprise that modern witchcraft was
embraced most enthusiastically in the USA and Britain, where the dominant
religion, Protestantism, downplays the centrality of the biblical Marys, and the
female saints have little role in devotion. Feminists also looked to the witch trials
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as evidence of how misogyny led to the
brutal and terrifying attempt to subjugate and control women in the past. Early
feminist works and the media bandied about the wildly exaggerated notion that
millions of accused witches were executed in the period. This reinforced the
conviction that witch hunting was synonymous with woman hunting. Yet, in
part through the influence of Wicca a new positive image of the witch was formed
in American and British mass culture, one that was empowering and defiant.
Witchcraft was no longer defined by such old stereotypes as the illiterate, wrinkled
woman who vented her frustrations on a harsh world through simple acts of
spiteful magic. Witchcraft was now about magic as a positive form of female
expression. Modern witches were reclaiming the inheritance for which their
ancestors had died, and that included the books that they were thought to own
as independent-minded women who were sacrificed to maintain patriarchal
control.

In the USA in the 1970s and early 1980s Anna Riva, the pseudonym of
Dorothy Spencer, who ran her own mail order hoodoo supplies company,
updated the pre-war pulp genre of short, populist grimoires by appealing to this
reformulated conception of the witch, with titles such as Modern Witchcraft Spell-
book (1973) and Spellcraft, Hexcraft and Witchcraft (1977). There were also more
familiar titles echoing the Dorene library such as Candle Burning Magic (1980),
Powers of the Psalms (1982), and Secrets of Magical Seals: A Modern Grimoire (1975).
They have been published regularly ever since for a few dollars. Following in her
footsteps is Migene Gonzalez- Wippler, a Puerto Rican academic who has written
several respected books on Santerta. Her awareness of the grimoire tradition has
led her down the commercial path and she now successfully writes and markets
books of practical magic. She has produced a new edition of the Sixth and Seventh
Books of Moses as well as a Book of Shadows, along with various guides for making

280 I Epilogue

amulets, talismans, and spells. The success and influence of both authors is not
predicated on their gender. They have rather spotted a commercial opportunity in a
market formerly dominated by men, by identifying how magic books could bridge
the gap between the old and recent traditions of magic and witchcraft. Anna Riva's
books, for instance, have a cultural and geographical appeal beyond the main US
market. Her Power of the Psalms and Magic with Incense and Powders are to be found
along with de Claremont's Seven Keys to Power on the bookshelves of 'spiritual
workers' in Tobago, and her Voodoo Handbook of Cult Secrets is sold in Jamaican drug
stores. 1 That said, in recent years much of the contemporary grimoire market has
been aimed at a Western female teenage audience fascinated by the portrayal of
contemporary practical magic and witchcraft in television dramas, rather than
histories of witchcraft or the awareness of venerable magical traditions.

The Harry Potter books and films have been blamed by some evangelicals for
being responsible for the explosion of teenage interest in practical magic. The
story of Hogwarts' child magicians represents a long tradition of fantasy fiction
involving youthful wizards, most notably Ursula Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea.
Harry Potter may be set in contemporary Britain, but it is a good old-fashioned
saga about 'chosen ones' and their role in the universal struggle between good and
evil. Teen witches appear to be more inspired by grimoire magic as part of the
everyday social reality of urban America, rather than titanic wand- waving battles
in remote gothic boarding schools.

The Craft (1996) was an influential template for the female teen witch. The film
concerned four girls in a Los Angeles Catholic high school who practise capricious
and vengeful magic with unfortunate consequences. Other films followed, such as
Practical Magic (1998), which borrowed historical themes familiar to millions of
high school students taught about the Salem witch trials. It was based on a novel
regarding the love lives of a couple of modern-day, hereditary witches in small-
town America who cast magic from a grimoire passed down to them through
the generations. But it was television that really cemented the grimoire as a
cultural artefact in contemporary Western society. Magic books were central to
the television series Charmed (1998—2006), which concerned three co-habiting
sister witches in their twenties who get involved in various supernatural escapades.
Like all modern screen witches they also happened to be attractive and glamorous,
reversing the old stereotype of the hag- witch. The sisters in Charmed derive their
power from a leather-bound Book of Shadows that, so the plot relates, was first
written by an unfortunate female ancestor burned at the stake in the seventeenth
century and was then supplemented over the centuries as it passed down the
female line. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997—2003), with its high school setting, was
the other influential TV series in inspiring teenagers to explore the possibilities of
magic. For the first few seasons the Sunnydale School library, with its old books

Epilogue | 281

on magic taken from the British Library, was central to the narrative, while one
of the central characters, Willow, became a 'Wiccan', casting spells using her
grimoire. 2 It was while Buffy was at its height of popularity that I used to receive
periodic e-mails from teenagers, mostly girls from the USA and Britain, asking to
know more about witchcraft and how to cast spells. They had seen my personal
website presenting my historical studies on witchcraft and magic and assumed I
was a practitioner. The flow of e-mails tellingly tailed off once Buffy and Charmed
ended.

While undoubtedly inspired by these American dramas the teen witch
phenomenon has developed a life of its own, fostered by the social networking
possibilities of the Internet, which allow teenagers to form communities outside
the school environment. Books still remain fundamental to the teen witch
experience though; spells cut-and-pasted from the Web clearly do not have
the same appeal. The American author Silver RavenWolf is the queen of teen
grimoire writers, and the advertising blurb for her Solitary Witch encapsulates
well the appeal of her successful formula, explaining that the book 'relates
specifically to today's young adults and their concerns, yet is grounded in the
magickal work of centuries past'. Many of the Buffy generation have subse-
quently lost interest in practical magic, but others have no doubt developed a
more lasting spiritual and social interest in magic as a religion, and have
graduated from guides written specifically for youth culture to exploring the
grimoires of old.

The grimoire continues to have huge cultural currency far beyond those who
practise magic or who fantasize about doing so. Several of the largest publishing
sensations of the past few years are products of the history of magic books.
Apocryphal stories, which were a big influence on the development of grimoires,
lie at the heart of the huge success of the Da Vinci Code. The book evidently taps
into a continuing popular undercurrent of suspicion that over the centuries the
Christian authorities have withheld the true story of Christ, and that ancient secret
knowledge equals power. King Solomon and his apocryphal magical reputation
continue to intrigue, with rumours abound on the Internet that Dan Brown is
writing a book called The Solomon Key. Another international bestseller, Arturo
Perez-Reverte's rollicking novel The Club Dumas, and the film adaptation The
Ninth Gate, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Johnny Depp, also owe their
popularity to the notion that secret diabolic books still circulate amongst us. The
story concerns a maverick antiquarian book dealer who finds himself drawn into a
dangerous search for the surviving copies of the fictional Book of the Nine Doors of
the Kingdom of Shadows, which was printed in the mid-seventeenth century. Its
author was burned at the behest of the Inquisition and only three copies were
saved from the flames. Together they provide the key to summoning the Devil.

282 | Epilogue

The book dealer's quest leads him to Paris and Toledo, the legendary medieval
home of magic. All the elements of this story will be familiar to the reader, and
they evidently continue to fascinate today just as they held the attention of readers
in earlier centuries.

In her bestseller Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004), Susanna Clarke
re-creates an early-nineteenth-century England where learned magic once again
becomes a profound force after centuries in the shadows, echoing the real, though
decidedly less fantastic world of Francis Barrett, John Denley, and John Parkins.
Old magic books are central to her clever, gothic re-imagining of the occult
milieu of the period, mentioning titles that sound familiar to the reader but are in
fact her own inventions. Clarke even constructs her own history of literary magic,
inventing the maxim, 'a book of magic should be written by a practising magician,
rather than a theoretical magician or a historian of magic. What could be more
reasonable? And yet already we are in difficulties.' 3 This history of grimoires has
shown what those difficulties were in the real past.

So grimoires are still with us, not mere historical artefacts but cultural symbols,
but what of the magic they contain? Only a small minority in the prosperous
Western world still believe in the power of magic let alone practise it. This cannot
be explained as a result of education and the consequent spread of rational
knowledge. We need only think of the enduring popularity of magic's partner,
astrology. Many millions continue to believe in the intercessionary power of
angels. Furthermore, literacy has always been the key to the power of grimoires,
and their spread actually mirrors the growth of popular education. No, reason has
not ended our relationship with magic. It is just that most of us in the West no
longer need magic in our lives. Who needs to conjure up spirits to find buried
treasure when you can use a metal detector? Seriously, though, much of magic
was also about health. Modern medicine can do so much more for us than it could
fifty years ago let alone a hundred. Before that it was pretty hopeless at dealing
with most major illnesses. Wherever people do not have access to modern
medicine today it is understandable that they still depend on magic, on religious
faith alone. With sexual liberation, the freedom to divorce, and the pill, few
now resort to grimoires to ensure the success of their love lives, though as the
popularity of horoscopes and astrological birth signs suggests, many people still
place some faith in the occult to try and ensure successful relationships. But
grimoire magic was not only put to practical ends. As we have seen, for some
intellectual magicians magic was about religious expression and attaining spiritual
harmony, and while this impulse might be rare in the context of the main religions
these days, it continues to be central to the new Western formulations of the
pre-Christian religious world and to syncretic religions elsewhere.

Epilogue | 283

Grimoires have never been more easily available. As we enter uncertain times
on a global scale, who knows whether they and their magic, which in the past
gave order to a chaotic and unpredictable world, will once again assume wider
social importance. If they do, then they are easily at hand. There is no sign of these
books being closed for good.

Picture Acknowledgements

In a few instances we have been unable to trace the copyright owner prior to
publication. If notified, the publishers will be pleased to amend the acknowledge-
ments in any future edition. © Archives departementales des Landes/Alain
Girons: p. 102; The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (Douce A360):
p. 99; © British Library Board. All rights reserved: p. 49 (C40 M 10), p. 51
(7i9.f.i6), p. 103 (RB.23.a.25734), p. 122 (C143 cc 19), p. 133 (P.P. 5441. ba,
frontispiece); Cambridge University Library: p. 151 (N.2.19), p. 276 (8000. c. 144);
reprinted from H.P. Hansen, Khge Folk (Copenhagen, 1961), vol. 2, plate 3:
p. 130; National Library of Jamaica: p. 228; Steven Wood/North Yorkshire
County Council, Skipton Library and Information Centre: p. 58; Wellcome
Library, London: p. 125, p. 136

Further Reading

Primary sources

Numerous extracts from ancient Greek, Roman, Graeco-Egyptian, and Coptic magic texts
can be found in:

Betz, Hans Dieter (ed.), The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation: Including the Demotic Spells,

2nd edn (Chicago, 1992).
Meyer, Marvin W., Richard Smith, and Neal Kelsey (eds), Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic

Texts of Ritual Power (Princeton, [1994] 1999).
Ogden, Daniel, Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Source Book

(Oxford, 2002).

For extensive extracts from medieval and early modern manuscript grimoires see:

Lecouteux, Claude, he livres des grimoires (Paris, 2002).

Shah, Idries, The Secret Lore of Magic: Books of the Sorcerers (London, 1957).

Waite, Arthur Edward, The Book of Ceremonial Magic (Ware, [1911! 1992).

Translations of entire manuscripts from the medieval to the nineteenth century include:

Flowers, Stephen E., The Galdrabok: An Icelandic Book of Magic, 2nd edn (Smithville, 2005).

Gaster, M., The Sword of Moses: An Ancient Book of Magic (London, 1896).

Gollancz, Hermann, Sepher Maphteah Shelomoh (Book of the Key of Solomon) (Oxford, 1914).

Kieckhefer, Richard, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer's Manual of the Fifteenth Century

(University Park/ Stroud, 1997).
Mathers, Samuel Liddle MacGregor, The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage

(London, 1898).

The Key of Solomon the King (Clavicula Salomonis) (London, 1889).

Peterson, Joseph H., The Lesser Key of Solomon: Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (York Beach,
2001).

Rustad, Mary S., The Black Books ofElverum (Lakeville, [1999] 2006).

Skinner, Stephen, and David Rankine, The Goetia of Dr Rudd (London, 2007).

Joseph H. Peterson's website http://www.esotericarchives.com and the highly recom-
mended CD he has produced provide numerous transcripts and translations of rare
grimoires and books of magic. He is to be congratulated for producing an important
resource for scholars and the general public.

286 | Further Reading

Histories of magic

There are few good general surveys of magic covering the entire period of this book. A
highly recommended companion is Michael D. Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe: A
Concise History from Antiquity to the Present (Lanham, 2007). The six volumes of the Athlone
History of Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, under the general editorship of Bengt Ankarloo
and Stuart Clark, also provide extensive coverage of the subject from antiquity to the
present through lengthy essays of influential historians in the field. My own Cunning-Folk:
Popular Magic in English History (London, 2003), while primarily concerned with England,
also has a chapter on European comparisons. Lynn Thorndike's monumental eight-
volume History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York, 1923—58) is an essential
though expensive resource on the intellectual magical tradition up until the
Enlightenment. Mention should also be given to Christopher Mcintosh's The Devil's
Bookshelf (Wellingborough, 1985), which provides a brief, breezy but well-informed
introduction to the history of grimoires. Below I provide further suggested reading by
period and region. They are just some of the works I have found helpful in understanding
the development and significance of grimoires.

Ancient Magic

Bohak, Gideon, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (Cambridge, 2008).

Bremmer, Jan N., and Jan R. Veenstra (eds), The Metamorphosis of Magic from Eate Antiquity

to the Early Modern Period (Leuven, 2002) .
Dickie, Matthew W., Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World (London, 2001).
Faraone, Christopher A., and Dirk Obbink (eds), Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and

Religion (Oxford, 1991).
Klutz, Todd (ed.), Magic in the Biblical World: From the Rod of Aaron to the Ring of Solomon

(London, 2003).

Mirecki, Paul, and Marvin Meyer (eds), Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World (Leiden,
2002).

Pinch, Geraldine, Magic in Ancient Egypt (London, [1994] 2006).

Shaked, Shaul (ed.), Officina Magica: Essays on the Practice of Magic in Antiquity (Leiden, 2005).
Smith, Morton, Jesus the Magician (New York, 1978).

Medieval

Bremmer, Jan N, and Jan R. Veenstra (eds), The Metamorphosis of Magic from Eate Antiquity

to the Early Modern Period (Leuven, 2002).
Burnett, Charles, and W. F. Ryan (eds), Magic and the Classical Tradition (London and

Turin, 2006).

Fanger, Claire (ed.), Conjuring Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic (Stroud,
1998).

Flint, Valerie, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, 1991).
Jolly, Karen Louise, Popular Religion in Eate Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context (Chapel
Hill, 1996).

Further Reading | 287

Kieckhefer, Richard, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989).

Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer's Manual of the Fifteenth Century (University Park/

Stroud, 1997).

MacLeod, Mindy, and Bernard Mees, Runic Amulets and Magic Objects (Woodbridge,
2006).

Page, Sophie, Magic in Medieval Manuscripts (London, 2004) .
Ryder, Catherine, Magic and Impotence in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2006).
Skemer, Don C, Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages (University Park,
2006).

Trachtenberg, Joshua, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion (New York,
1939)-

Renaissance to the eighteenth century
Europe

The period of the witch trials, which is an important episode in the story of grimoires, has
attracted a huge number of studies. The reader will find accessible overviews of the history
of the witch trials and how historians have interpreted them in the likes of Brian Levack,
The Witch-Hunt in Early Modem Europe (3rd edn, Harlow, 2006), and Jonathan Barry and
Owen Davies (eds), Witchcraft Historiography (Basingstoke, 2007). Below is a sample of
English language histories concerning different types of magical practice and literature in
the period.

Barbierato, Federico, 'Magical Literature and the Venice Inquisition from the Sixteenth to
the Eighteenth Centuries', in C. Gilly and C. Van Heertum (eds), Magia, Alchimia,
Scienza Dal '400 al '700 (Florence, 2002).

Bever, Edward, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe: Culture,
Cognition, and Everyday Life (Basingstoke, 2008).

Butler, Elizabeth M., Ritual Magic (Stroud, [1949] 1998).

Eamon, William, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early

Modern Culture (Princeton, 1994).
Kassell, Lauren, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London. Simon Forman: Astrologer,

Alchemist and Physician (Oxford, 2005).
Martin, Ruth, Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice 1550-1650 (Oxford, 1989).
Mollenauer, Lynn Wood, Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XIV's

France (University Park, 2007).
Monter, William, Ritual, Myth and Magic in Early Modern Europe (Brighton, 1983).
Ruggiero, Guido, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage and Power at the End of the

Renaissance (Oxford, 1993).
Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971).

Vickers, Brian (ed.), Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1984).
Walker, D. P., Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London, 1958).
Wilson, Stephen, The Magical Universe: Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-Modern Europe
(London, 2000).

Yates, Frances A., The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London, 1979).

288 | Further Reading

Eighteenth to the twentieth century
Europe

Bachter, Stephan, 'Grimoires and the Transmission of Magical Knowledge', in Owen
Davies and Willem de Blecourt (eds), Beyond the Witch Trials: Witchcraft and Magic in
Enlightenment Europe (Manchester, 2004), 194-207.

'Anleitung zum Aberglauben: Zauberbiicher und die Verbreitung magischen

"Wissens" seit dem 18. Jahrhundert', PhD, Hamburg (2005). Available online at
http://www.sub.uni-hamburg.de/ opus/volltexte/2007/3221/pdfy
DissBachter.pdf

Blecourt, Willem de and Owen Davies (eds), Witchcraft Continued: Popular Magic in Modern

Europe (Manchester, 2004).
Davies, Owen, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture iyy6-ig^i (Manchester, 1999).

Murder, Magic, Madness: The Victorian Trials of Dove and the Wizard (Harlow, 2005).

Devlin, Judith, The Superstitious Mind: French Peasants and the Supernatural in the Nineteenth

Century (New Haven, 1987).
Doering-Manteuffel, Sabine, 'The Supernatural and the Development of Print Culture',

in Owen Davies and Willem de Blecourt (eds), Beyond the Witch Trials: Witchcraft and

Magic in Enlightenment Europe (Manchester, 2004), 187-94.
Krampl, Ulrike, 'When Witches Became False: Se'ducteurs and Credules Confront the Paris

Police at the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century', in Kathryn A. Edwards (ed.),

Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Belief and Folklore in Early Modern

Europe (Kirksville, 2002), 137-55.
McCalman, Iain, The East Alchemist: Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in the Age of Reason

(New York, 2003).

Midelfort, H. C. Erik, Exorcism and Enlightenment: fohann Joseph Gassner and the Demons of

Eighteenth- Century Germany (New Haven, 2005).
Stark, Laura, The Magical Self: Body, Society and the Supernatural in Early Modern Rural

Finland (Helsinki, 2006).
Stokker, Kathleen, Remedies and Rituals: Folk Medicine in Norway and the New Eand

(Minnesota, 2007).
Vicente, Castro, 'El Libro de San Cipriano (I)', Hibris 27 (2005), 15-25.

USA

Anderson, Jeffrey E., Conjure in African American Society (Baton Rouge, 2005).
Benes, Peter (ed.), Wonders of the Invisible World: 1600—1800 (Boston, 1995).
Brooke, John L., The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644—1844
(Cambridge, 1994).

Butler, Jon, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA,
1990).

Chireau, Yvonne P., Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition
(Berkeley, 2003).

Ellis, Bill, Eucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture (Lexington, 2004).

Further Reading | 289

Godbeer, Richard, The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England

(Cambridge, 1992).
Leventhal, Herbert, In the Shadow of the Enlightenment (New York, 1976).
Long, Carolyn Morrow, Spiritual Merchants: Religion, Magic, and Commerce (Knoxville,

2001).

McGinnis, J. Ross, Trials of Hex (Davis/Trinity Publishing Co., 2000).

Quinn, D. Michael, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 2nd edn (Salt Lake City,

1998) .

Versluis, Arthur, The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance (New York, 2000).
Yoder, Don, Discovering American Folklife: Essays on Folk Cultures and the Pennsylvania Dutch
(Mechanicsburg, [1990] 2001).

Caribbean, Central and South America

Olmos, Margarite Fernandez, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gelbert, Creole Religions of the

Caribbean (New York, 2003).
Henningsen, Gustav, 'The Diffusion of European Magic in Colonial America', in Jens

Christian V. Johansen, Erling Ladewig Petersen, and Henrik Stevnsborg (eds), Clashes of

Cultures: Essays in Honour of Niels Steensgaard (Odense, 1992), 160-78.
Houk, James T., Spirits, Blood, and Drums: The Orisha Religion in Trinidad (Philadelphia,

1995)-

Metraux, Alfred, Ee vaudou haiiien (Paris, [1958] 1968).

Payne-Jackson, Arvilla and Mervyn C. Alleyne, famaican Folk Medicine (Kingston, 2004).
Souza, Laura de Mello e, The Devil and the Eand of the Holy Cross: Witchcraft, Slavery, and

Popular Religion in Colonial Brazil, trans. Diane Grosklaus Whitty (Austin, 2003).
Taussig, Michael, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing

(Chicago, 1987).

Modern magic traditions

Berger, Helen A., and Douglas Ezzy, Teenage Witches: Magical Youth and the Search for the

Self (New Brunswick, 2007).
Evans, Dave, The History of British Magick after Crowley (Harpenden, 2007).
Harms, Daniel, and John Wisdom Gonce III, The Necronomicon Files (Boston, MA, [1998]

2003).

Howe, Ellic, Urania's Children (London, 1967).

Hutton, Ronald, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford,

1999) -

Johnston, Hannah E., and Peg Aloi (eds), The New Generation Witches: Teenage Witchcraft in

Contemporary Culture (Aldershot, 2007).
King, Francis, Modern Ritual Magic: The Rise of Western Occultism (Bridport, [1970] 1989).
Owen, Alex, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern

(Chicago, 2004).

Ruickbie, Leo, Witchcraft Out of the Shadows: A Complete History (London, 2004).

290 I Further Reading

Treitel, Corinna, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern
(Baltimore, 2004).

Uzzel, Robert L., Eliphas Levi and the Kabbalah: The Masonic and French Connection of the
American Mystery Tradition (Lafayette, 2006).

Books and literacy

Chartier, Roger, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane
(Princeton, 1987).

Chaudenson, Robert, Creolization of Language and Culture, revised in collaboration with

Salikoko S. Mufwene; trans. Sheri Pargman (London, 2001).
Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book, trans. David Gerard

(London, [1958] 1976).
Fischer, Steven Roger, A History of Writing (London, 2001).
Goody, Jack (ed.), Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1968).
Graff, Harvey J., The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture

and Society (Bloomington/Indianapolis, 1987).
Hayes, Kevin J., Folklore and Book Culture (Knoxville, 1997).
Millard, Alan, Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus (New York, 2000) .
Street, Brian V. (ed.), Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy (Cambridge, 1993).
Walsham, Alexandra, and Julia Crick (eds), The Uses of Script and Print, 1300-1700

(Cambridge, 2004).

Notes

Introduction

1. Francois Noel and M. L. J. Carpentier, Philologie francaise (Paris, 183 1), i.742; Diction-
naire de I'Academie Francoise, 5th edn (Paris, 1814), i.669; Claude Lecouteux, Le livre des
grimoires (Paris, 2002), 9.

2. For a good recent discussion see Michael D. Bailey, 'The Meanings of Magic', Magic,
Ritual, and Witchcraft 1:1 (2006), 1—24.

3. Richard Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer's Manual of the Fifteenth Century
(University Park, 1997), 4.

4. I particularly recommend Michael D. Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe: A Concise
History from Antiquity to the Present (Lanham, 2007), which is an ideal companion to
this book.

5. E. M. Loeb, review of Joh. Winkler, Die Toha-Batak auf Sumatra, in American Anthro-
pologist, ns, 32:4 (1930), 682-7; Harley Harris Bartlett, 'A Batak and Malay Chant on
Rice Cultivation, with Introductory Notes on Bilingualism and Acculturation in
Indonesia', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 96:6 (1952), 631.

6. Schuyler Cammann, 'Islamic and Indian Magic Squares. Part 1', History of Religions 8:3
(!969), 181-209; David Pingree, 'Indian Planetary Images and the Tradition of Astral
Magic' , Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 52 (1989), 1-13.

7. See, for example, Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971), 51—2;
David Cressy, 'Books as Totems in Seventeenth-Century England and New England',
Journal of Library History 21 (1986), 92—106; Stephen Wilson, The Magical Universe:
Everyday Ritual and Magic in Pre-Modern Europe (London, 2000), passim.

8. See, for example, Bengt Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in South Africa (London, 1961), 278;
Patrick A. Polk, 'Other Books, Other Powers: The 6* and 7" Books of Moses in

292 | Notes

Afro-Atlantic Folk Belief, Southern Folklore 56:2 (1999), 122; Douglas MacRae
Taylor, The Black Carih of British Honduras (New York, 1951), 136; Caroline H.
Bledsoe and Kenneth M. Robey, Arabic Literacy and Secrecy among the Mende of
Sierre Leone', Man, ns, 21:2 (1986), 219.

9. Kenneth Anthony Lum, Praising His Name in the Dance: Spirit Possession in the Spiritual
Baptist Faith and Orisha Work in Trinidad (Amsterdam, 1999), 120.

10. Don C. Skemer, Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages (University Park,
2006), 137, 239; Henry O'Neill, The Fine Arts and Civilization of Ancient Ireland
(London, 1863), 76; Jack Goody, 'Restricted Literacy in Northern Ghana', in idem
(ed.), Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge 1968), 230-1; Abdullahi Osman
El-Tom, 'Drinking the Koran: The Meaning of Koranic Verses in Berti Erasure',
Africa 55:4 (1985), 414-31; Bartlett, A Batak and Malay Chant'.

1 1 . The term was coined in Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 269.

I Ancient and Medieval Grimoires

1 . Cited in Daniel Ogden, Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A
Source Book (Oxford, 2002), 41—2.

2. Jonas C. Greenfield and Michael E. Stone, 'The Books of Enoch and the Traditions of
Enoch', Numen 26 (1979), 89-103; M. Plessner, 'Hermes Trismegistus and Arab
Science', Studia Islamica 2 (1954), 54; P. S. Alexander, 'Incantations and Books of
Magic', in Emil Schiirer (ed.), The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Christ
(17$ BC-AD135), rev. and ed. Geza Vermes, Fergus Millar, and Martin Goodman
(Edinburgh, 1986), vol. iii, pt 1, p. 369.

3. Karl H. Dannenfeldt, 'The Pseudo-Zoroastrian Oracles in the Renaissance', Studies in
the Renaissance 4 (1957), 7-30; George Lyman Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New
England (New York, [1929] 1958), 42; Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experi-
mental Science, 8 vols (New York: 1923—58), ii.321; Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in
Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, 1991), 333-8; Benjamin Braude, 'The Sons of Noah
and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early
Modern Periods', The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 54:2 (1997), 103—42. On
contradictory legends regarding Zoroaster see Michael Stausberg, Faszination Zarathus-
tra: Zoraster und die Europaische Religionsgeschichte der Friihen Neuzeit, 2 vols (Berlin,
1998).

4. Joachim Oelsner, 'Incantations in Southern Mesopotamia — From Clay Tablets to
Magical Bowls', in Shaul Shaked (ed.), Officina Magica: Essays on the Practice of Magic
in Antiquity (Leiden, 2005), 31-3.

5. Jan N. Bremmer, 'Magic in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles', in Jan N. Bremmer and
Jan R. Veenstra (eds), The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modem
Period (Leuven, 2002), 53—4.

6. Georg Luck, Arcana Mundi (London, 1987), 11-13; Matthew W. Dickie, Magic and
Magicians in the Greco-Roman World (London, 2001), 204.

Notes | 293

7. Geraldine Pinch, Magic in Ancient Egypt (London, [1994] 2006), 160-7.

8. Luois H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World (Princeton, 1993), 285-8;
Dickie, Magic and Magicians, 223—4, 287— 93.

9. See Andreas B. Kilcher, 'The Moses of Sinai and the Moses of Egypt: Moses as
Magician in Jewish Literature and Western Esotericism', Aries 4:2 (2004), 148—70.

10. Ibid. 158—67; Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western
Monotheism (Cambridge, MA, 1997).

11. On these and other books attributed to Moses see John G. Gager, Moses in Greco-
Roman Paganism (Atlanta, 1989), 146-61.

12. Hans Dieter Betz (ed.), The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation: Including the Demotic
Spells, vol. i: Texts, 2nd edn (Chicago, 1992), 189, 195.

13. Kilcher, 'Moses of Sinai', 167.

14. See Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (Cambridge, 2008), 175-9;
Alexander, 'Incantations and Books of Magic', 350—1; M. Gaster, The Sword of
Moses: An Ancient Booh, of Magic (London, 1896), 43.

15. Florian Ebeling, The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus : Hermeticism from Ancient to
Modern Times, trans. David Lorton (Ithaca, 2007), 6.

16. Plessner, 'Hermes Trismegistus', 52.

17. William Adler, 'Berossus, Manetho, and "1 Enoch" in the World Chronicle of
Panodorus', Harvard Theological Review 76:4 (1983), 428-30.

18. Ebeling, Secret History, 9.

19. Thorndike, History of Magic, ii. 226-7; Nicolas Weill-Parot, Astral Magic and Intel-
lectual Changes (Twelfth— Fifteenth Centuries)', in Bremmer and Veenstra (eds),
Metamorphosis of Magic, 170, 172.

20. On Solomon, the Testament, and magic see Dennis Durling, 'Solomon, Exorcism, and
the Son of David', Harvard Theological Review 68:3/4 ( I 975)> 2 35 — 5 2 l idem, 'The
Testament of Solomon: Retrospective and Prospect', Journal of Pseudepigraphical Studies
2 (1988), 87—112; Sarah lies Johnston, 'The Testament of Solomon from Late Antiquity
to the Renaissance', in Bremmer and Veenstra (eds), Metamorphosis of Magic, 36—49;
Todd Klutz, Rewriting the Testament of Solomon: Tradition, Conflict and Identity in a Late
Antique Pseudepigraphon (London, 2005).

21. W. F. Ryan, The Bathhouse at Midnight: Magic in Russia (Stroud, 1999), 303.

22. See, for example, Miroslav Marcovich, Studies in Graeco-Roman Religions and Gnosticism
(Leiden, 1988), 28-47; Walter O. Moeller, The Mithraic Origin and Meanings of the
Rotas-Sator Square (Leiden, 1973); Bruce Manning Metzger, New Testament Studies
(Leiden, 1980), 30.

23. Several scholarly editions of the Testament of Solomon have been produced. For an
overview of their qualities see Klutz, Rewriting the Testament of Solomon, 1-4. An online
annotated version of one translation is provided at http:/ /www. esotericarchives.com/
solomon/ testamen.htm.

294 I Notes

24. Johnston, 'The Testament of Solomon', 43 n. 5.

25. Thorndike, History of Magic, ii.280.

26. Jan R. Veenstra, 'The Holy Almandal: Angels and the Intellectual Aims of Magic', in
Bremmer and Veenstra (eds), Metamorphosis of Magic, 189—229.

27. See Claire Fanger, 'Plundering the Egyptian Treasure: John the Monk's Book of Visions
and its Relation to the Ars Notoria of Solomon', in Claire Fanger (ed.), Conjuring
Spirits: Texts and Traditions of Medieval Ritual Magic (Stroud, 1998), 217-49; Michael
Camille, 'Visual Art in Two Manuscripts of the Ars Notoria', in Fanger (ed.),
Conjuring Spirits, 110—42; Frank Klaassen, 'English Manuscripts of Magic, 1300—
1500: A Preliminary Survey', in Fanger (ed.), Conjuring Spirits, 14-19; Benedek
Lang, 'Angels around the Crystal: The Prayer Book of King Wladislas and the
Treasure Hunts of Henry the Bohemian', Aries 5:1 (2005), 6-14.

28. See David L. Wagner (ed.), The Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages (Bloomington,
1983).

29. Robert Mathiesen, 'The Key of Solomon: Toward a Typology of the Manuscripts',
Societas Magica Newsletter 17 (2007), 1-9.

30. Stephen Charles Haar, Simon Magus: The First Gnostic? (Berlin, 2003), 158—9; Florent
Heintz, Simon 'Le Magicien': Actes 8, 5—25 et V accusation de magie contre les prophetes
thaumaturges dans I'antiquite (Paris, 1997), pt. 4.

31. Thorndike, History of Magic, i.368— 9; Hans-Josef Klauck, Magic and Paganism in Early
Christianity: The World of the Acts of the Apostles (Edinburgh, 2000), 14—17.

32. See Alberto Ferreiro, Simon Magus in Patristic, Medieval and Early Modern Traditions
(Leiden, 2005), ch. 10; Flint, Rise of Magic, 338-44.

33. Ferreiro, Simon Magus, 210-12.

34. See E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (London, 1993), ch. 10; Georg Luck,
'Witches and Sorcerers in Classical Literature', in Valerie Flint, Richard Gordon,
Georg Luck, and Daniel Ogden (eds), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: Ancient Greece
and Rome (London, 1999), 124—5; Michael D. Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe:
A Concise History from Antiquity to the Present (Lanham, 2007), 46-9; Richard Kieckhe-
fer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989), 34-6; Carl H. Kraeling, 'Was Jesus
Accused of Necromancy?', Journal of Biblical Literature 59:2 (1940), 147—57; Justin
Meggitt, 'Magic, Healing and Early Christianity: Consumption and Completion', in
Amy Wygant (ed.), The Meanings of Magic from the Bible to Buffalo Bill (New York,
2006), 89—117. For a full-blown attempt at revealing Jesus as a magician see Morton
Smith, Jesus the Magician (New York, 1978).

35. Sanders, Historical Figure of Jesus, 146—7.

36. Veenstra, 'The Holy Almandal', 201.

37. loan P. Culianu, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago,
1987), 167.

38. Hermann Gollancz, Sepher Maphteah Shelomoh (Book of the Key of Solomon) (Oxford,
1914); transcript by Joseph H. Peterson online at http://www.esotericarchives.com/

Notes | 295

gollancz/mafteahs.htm. On the dating see Claudia Rohrbacher-Sticker, 'Mafteah
Shelomoh: A New Acquisition of the British Library', Jewish Studies Quarterly 1
(1993/4), 263-70; eadem, 'A Hebrew Manuscript of Clavicula Salomonis, Part IF,
The British Library Journal 21 (1995), 128-36.

39. Dickie, Magic and Magicians, 72.

40. See David Diringer, The Book before Printing: Ancient, Medieval and Oriental (New
York, 1982), ch. 4.

41. Samson Eitrem, 'Dreams and Divination in Magical Ritual', in Christopher
A. Faraone and Dirk Obbink (eds), Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion
(Oxford, 1991), 177, 186 n. 52.

42. Clarence A. Forbes, 'Books for the Burning', Transactions and Proceedings of the American
Philological Association 67 (1936), 118, 120; A. A. Barb, 'Survival of Magic Arts', in
Arnaldo Momigliano (ed.), The Conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth
Century (Oxford, 1963), 102; Haig A. Bosmajian, Burning Books (Jefferson, 2006),
33-40; Daniel Christopher Sarefield,' "Burning Knowledge": Studies of Bookburning
in Ancient Rome', PhD thesis, Ohio State University (2004), esp. 76—89.

43. Chester C. McCown, 'The Ephesia Grammata in Popular Belief, Transactions and
Proceedings of the American Philological Association 54 (1923), 128-40; Paul Mirecki and
Marvin Meyer, Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World (Leiden, 2002), 113— 14; Daniel
Ogden, 'Binding Spells: Curse Tablets and Voodoo Dolls in the Greek and Roman
Worlds', in Flint, Gordon, Luck and Ogden (eds), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, 46-7;
Roy Kotansky, 'Incantations and Prayers for Salvation on Inscribed Greek Amulets', in
Faraone and Obbink (eds), Magika Hiera, 110— 12.

44. Paul Tabilco, The Early Christians in Ephesus from Paul to Ignatius (Tubingen, 2004),
149-52.

45. Quote taken from an online edition of Chrysotom's Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles,
Homily 38; http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schafr/npnfiii.vi.xxxviii.html; Barb, 'Survival
of the Magical Arts', 1 16.

46. Frank R. Trombley, 'Paganism in the Greek World at the End of the Antiquity: The
Case of Rural Anatolia and Greece', Harvard Theological Review 78:3/4 (1985), 336.

47. Sarefield,' "Burning Knowledge" ', 89 n. 158.

48. See Frank R. Trombley, Hellenic Religion and Christianization, c. 330-529, 2 vols (Leiden,
1993), ii.34-40.

49. Dickie, Magic and Magicians, 262.

50. Michael Kulikowski, 'Fronto, the Bishops, and the Crowd: Episcopal Justice and
Communal Violence in Fifth-Century Tarraconensis', Early Medieval Europe 11:4
(2002), 295-320.

51. Cited in Jennifer M. Corry, Perceptions of Magic in Medieval Spanish Literature
(Bethlehem, PA, 2005), 38.

52. See Stephen Pollington, Leechcraft: Early English Charms, Plant Lore, and Healing
(Hockwold-cum- Wilton, 2000), 419-85; Karen Louise Jolly, Popular Religion in Late

296 I Notes

Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context (Chapel Hill, 1996); Alaric Hall, Elves in Anglo-
Saxon England (Woodbridge, 2007).

53. Don C. Skemer, Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages (University Park,
2006), 76-84; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England
1400-1580 (New Haven, 1992), 268-87.

54. Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 182—3.

55. Steven Roger Fischer, A History of Writing (London, 2001), 238, 244; Alan Millard,
Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus (New York, 2000), 61-84; J- B. Poole and
R. Reed, 'The Preparation of Leather and Parchment by the Dead Sea Scrolls
Community', Technology and Culture 3:1 (1962), 15— 16; Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish
Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion (New York, 1939), 144.

56. Domenico Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. E. F. Benecke (Princeton,
[1895] 1997), 273—4, 3 1 — 7; John Webster Spargo, Virgil the Necromancer: Studies in
Virgilian Legends (Cambridge, MA, 1934), 33. See also Mario N. Pavia, 'Virgil as
Magician', The Classical Journal 46:2 (1950), 61-4.

57. Juliette Wood, 'Virgil and Taliesin: The Concept of the Magician in Medieval
Folklore', Folklore 94:1 (1983), 91, 94; John Moore, A View of Society and Manners in
Italy (Paris, 1803), ii.253.

58. For example, David Pingree, 'Learned Magic in the Time of Frederick IF, Micrologus 2
(1994), 44-

59. See the essays in J. Kraye, W. F. Ryan, and C. B. Schmitt (eds), Pseudo-Aristotle in the
Middle Ages (London, 1987); Steven J. Williams, The Secret of Secrets: The Scholarly
Career of a Pseudo- Aristotelian Text in the Latin Middle Ages (Ann Arbor, 2003).

60. Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture iyj6-ig5i (Manchester, 1999), 132.

61. David Pingree, 'The Diffusion of Arabic Magical Texts in Western Europe', in La
diffusione delle scienze islamiche nel Medio Evo europeo (Rome, 1987), 58-102.

62. Richard Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer's Manual of the Fifteenth Century
(University Park/Stroud, 1997), 178.

63. Erica Reiner, 'Astral Magic in Babylonia', Transactions of the American Philosophical
Society 85:4 (1995), 1— 150; David Pingree, 'Indian Planetary Images and the Tradition
of Astral Magic' , Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 52 (1989), 1— 13.

64. Charles Burnett, 'The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Program in Toledo
in the Twelfth Century', Science in Context 14:2 (2001), 249-88; Pingree, 'The
Diffusion of Arabic Magical Texts in Western Europe'. See also, Thomas F. Click,
Steven John Livesey, and Faith Wallis, Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An
Encyclopedia (New York, 2005), 478-81.

65. Quoted in Charles Singer, 'Daniel of Morley: An English Philosopher of the XII
Century', Isis 3:2 (1920), 264.

66. See David Pingree, 'Some of the Sources of the Ghayat al-hakim' , Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes 43 (1980), 1— 15; J. Thomann, 'The Name of Picatrix:

Notes | 297

Transcription or Translation?', Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 53 (1990),
289—96.

67. Most recently see Edgar Walter Francis, 'Islamic Symbols and Sufi Rituals for Protec-
tion and Healing: Religion and Magic in the Writings of Ahmad ibn Ali al-Buni
(d. 622/1225)', PhD thesis, University of California (2005).

68. J. Ferreiro Alemparte, 'La escuela de nigromancia de Toledo', Anuario de studios
medievales 13 (1983), 208.

69. Ibid. 226—40; Stephan Maksymiuk, The Court Magician in Medieval German Romance
(Frankfurt, 1996), 139.

70. Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1972), 163.

71. Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium Maleficarum, trans. E. A. Ashwin (New York,
[1929! 1988), 194.

72. See Francois Delpech, 'Grimoires et savoirs souterrains: elements pour une archeo-
mythologie du livre magique', in Dominique de Courcelles (ed.), he pouvoir des livres a
la Renaissance (Paris, 1998), 23-46; Fernando Ruiz de la Puerta, La Cueva de Hercules y el
Palacio Encantado de Toledo (Madrid, 1977); Samuel M. Waxman, Chapters on Magic in
Spanish Literature (Kessinger [1916], 2007), 1—32.

73. Corry, Perceptions of Magic, 154—7.

74. Lynette M. F. Bosch, Art, Liturgy, and Legend in Renaissance Toledo (Philadelphia,
2000), 24.

75. Waxman, Chapters on Magic, 32—42; Martin Del Rio, Investigations into Magic, trans and
ed. P. G. Maxwell-Stuart (Manchester, 2000), 28.

76. Montague Summers, Witchcraft and Black Magic (London, [1946] 1964), 102.

77. Thorndike, History of Magic, ii.229— 35; Antonio Rigo, 'From Constantinople to the
Library of Venice: The Hermetic Books of Late Byzantine Doctors, Astrologers and
Magicians', in C. Gilly and C. van Heertum (eds), Magia, alchimia, scienza dal '400 al
'700. L'influsso di Ermete Trismegisto /Magic, Alchemy and Science i^th-i8th Centuries
(Florence, 2002), i.77— 83; Jeffrey Spier, 'A Revival of Antique Magical Practice in
Tenth-Century Constantinople', in Charles Burnett and W. F. Ryan (eds), Magic and
the Classical Tradition (London/Turin, 2006), 33.

78. See Dov Schwartz, Studies on Astral Magic in Medieval Jewish Thought (Leiden, 2004).

79. Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic, 221—4.

80. See Philip S. Alexander, 'Sefer Ha-Razim and the Problem of Black Magic in Early
Judaism', in Todd Klutz (ed.), Magic in the Biblical World: From the Rod of Aaron to the
Ring of Solomon (London, 2003), 170-90.

81. Ibid. 190.

82. See Reimund Leicht, 'Some Observations on the Diffusion of Jewish Magical Texts
from Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages in Manuscripts from the Cairo
Genizah and Ashkenaz', in Shaked (ed.), Officina Magica, 213-31; Steven M. Wasser-
strom, 'The Unwritten Chapter: Notes towards a Social and Religious History of

298 I Notes

Geniza Magic', in Shaked (ed.), Officina Magica. On other sources of medieval Jewish
magic see Trachtenberg's Jewish Magic and Superstition.

83. Jacob Z. Lauterbach, 'Substitutes for the Tetragrammaton', Proceedings of the American
Academy for Jewish Research 2 (1930-1), 39-67; Skemer, Binding Words, 114.

84. Stephen Mitchell, 'Learning Magic in the Sagas', in Geraldine Barnes and Margaret
Clunies Ross (eds), Old Norse Myths, Literature and Society (Sydney, 2000), 336.

85. Mindy MacLeod and Bernard Mees, Runic Amulets and Magic Objects (Woodbridge,
2006), 6.

86. Ibid. 1 50-1.

87. Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 141; Charles Burnett and Marie Stoklund,
'Scandinavian Runes in a Latin Magical Treatise', Speculum 58:2 (1983), 419—29.

88. The seminal study is still Theodor Zahn, Cyprian von Antiochen und die deutsche
Faustsage (Erlangen, 1882). There is a lengthy English review of his theories in The
American Journal of Philology 3:12 (1882), 470—3.

89. Cited in Flint, Rise of Magic, 234.

90. See Martin P. Nilsson, 'Greek Mysteries in the Confession of St. Cyprian', Harvard
Theological Review 40:3 (1947), 167—76; Edgar J. Goodspeed, 'The Martyrdom of
Cyprian and Justa', American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 19:2 (1903),
65-82.

91. Fred C. Robinson, '"The Complaynt off Sanct Cipriane, the Grett Nigromancer":
A Poem by Anthony Ascham', Review of English Studies, ns 27:107 (1976), 257-65.

92. Marvin W. Meyer, Richard Smith, and Neal Kelsey (eds), Ancient Christian Magic:
Coptic Texts of Ritual Power (Princeton, [1994] 1999), 155.

93. J. S. Wingate, 'The Scroll of Cyprian: An Armenian Family Amulet', Folklore 41:2
(1930), 169—87; Enno Littmann, 'The Magic Book of the Disciples', Journal of the
American Oriental Society 25 (1904), 1—48.

94. Robert Mathiesen, 'A Thirteenth-Century Ritual to Attain the Beatific Vision from
the Sworn Book of Honorius of Thebes', in Fanger (ed.), Conjuring Spirits, 147-50;
Thorndike, History of Magic, ii.284— 9.

95. L.-F. Alfred Maury, La magie et I'astrologie dans I'antiquite et au Moyen Age, 3rd edn
(Paris, 1864), 224.

96. <http://www.librairierossignol.fr/article.php?ref=magieenchiridion>. For early ref-
erences see Louis Gougaud, 'La priere dite de Charlemagne et les pieces apocryphes
apparentees', Revue d'histoire ecclesiastique 20 (1924), 233-8; Curt F. Buhler, 'Prayers
and Charms in Certain Middle English Scrolls', Speculum 39:2 (1964), 271 n. 12. See
also Arthur Edward Waite, The Book of Ceremonial Magic (Ware, [1911] 1992), 39—45.

97. See Helen L. Parish, Monks, Miracles and Magic: Reformation Representations of the
Medieval Church (London, 2005), 129-34.

98. See Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons (London, 1975), 180-5.

Notes | 299

99. John Napier, A Plaine Discoverie of the Whole Revelation of Saint John (London, 1594),
44, 48; The Examination of John Walsh, before Maister Thomas Williams (London, 1566),
preface; Parish, Monks, Miracles and Magic, 137.

100. Sophie Page, 'Image-Magic Texts and a Platonic Cosmology at St Augustine's,
Canterbury, in the Late Middle Ages', in Burnett and Ryan (eds), Magic and the
Classical Tradition, 69; Klaassen, 'English Manuscripts of Magic', 9.

101. Edward Peters, The Magician, The Witch, and the Law (Philadelphia, 1978), 89-90.

102. Frank Klaassen, 'Learning and Masculinity in Manuscripts of Ritual Magic of the
Later Middle Ages and Renaissance', Sixteenth Century Journal 38:1 (2007), 60.

103. Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 153-6.

104. Culianu, Eros and Magic, 167—8.

105. See James Wood Brown, An Enquiry into the Life and Legend of Michael Scot (Edinburgh,
1897), esp. 215-19.

106. On the changing reputation of Bacon see Amanda Power, 'A Mirror for Every Age:
The Reputation of Roger Bacon', English Historical Review 121 (2006), 657—92.

107. Quoted in Thorndike, History of Magic, ii.314, 279; William Eamon, Science and the
Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton,
1994), 7i-

108. John Bale, Illustrum Maioris Britanniae Scriptorum (Gippeswici, 1548), fo. 114V— 115;
Thomas Wright, Narratives of Sorcery and Magic (New York, [1851] 1852), 131; Waite,
Book of Ceremonial Magic, 23. On Bale's changing attitude towards Bacon see Power,
'A Mirror for Every Age', 661—2.

109. The famous historie of Fryer Bacon Containing the wonderfull things that he did in his life
(London, 1679), G3V.

no. See Thorndike, History of Magic, ii. 874-947.

in. Ibid, ii.911— 12, 925; Waite, Book of Ceremonial Magic, 89-92.

112. The boke of secretes of Albertus Magnus (London, 1560), p. ciiiiv.

113. Kittredge, Witchcraft, 207; Lang, 'Angels around the Crystal', 23-6.

114. Matteo Duni, Under the Devil's Spell: Witches, Sorcerers, and the Inquisition in Renais-
sance Italy (Florence, 2007), 91.

115. See Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, 79—91.

116. Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons, 194, 196.

117. See Stephen Mitchell, 'Anaphrodisiac Charms in the Nordic Middle Ages: Impo-
tence, Infertility, and Magic', Norveg. Tidsskrift for folkloristikk 38 (1998), 19-42;
Catherine Ryder, Magic and Impotence in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2006) .

118. Ryder, Magic and Impotence, 78.

119. Jan R. Veenstra, Magic and Divination at the Courts of Burgundy and France (Leiden,
1998), 69-71; Veenstra, 'The Holy Almandal', 193, 197-8.

120. On childbirth charms see Skemer, Binding Words, ch. 5.

300 | Notes

121. Dickie, Magic and Magicians, 180-1, 188.

122. Kittredge, Witchcraft, 130.

123. Duni, Under the Devil's Spell, 48, 81.

124. Veenstra, Magic and Divination at the Courts of Burgundy, 61; Duni, Under the Devil's
Spell, 47. The Mangialoca case is fully examined in Grazia Biondi, Benvenuta e
Vlnquistitore (Modena, 1993).

125. Klaassen, 'Learning and Masculinity in Manuscripts of Ritual Magic', 55, 71, 74.

126. Peters, The Magician, 91; Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 157; Williams, Secret of
Secrets, 155, 156 n. 41. On the various Church pronouncements on magic see Peters,
The Magician, 71-81, 98-102, 148-55.

127. For other examples see Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites, 1—2.

128. Benedek Lang, 'Demons in Krakow, and Image Magic in a Magical Handbook', in
Eva Pocs and Gabor Klaniczay (eds), Christian Demonology and Popular Mythology:
Demons, Spirits, Witches (Budapest, 2006), 13, 27—8.

129. Cited in Peters, The Magician, 99—100.

130. For these figures and a detailed analysis of the medieval origins of the witch trials see
Michael D. Bailey, 'From Sorcery to Witchcraft: Clerical Conceptions of Magic in
the Later Middle Ages', Speculum 76:4 (2001), 960-90. See also Bailey, Magic and
Superstition, 126-40.

II The War against Magic

1. Alexandra Walsham and Julia Crick, 'Introduction: Script, Print, and History', in
eaedem (eds), The Uses of Script and Print, 1300—1700 (Cambridge, 2004), 1; Susan
Brigden, London and the Reformation, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1991), 157; Clive Griffin,
Journeymen-Printers, Heresy, and the Inquisition in Sixteenth- Century Spain (Oxford,
2005), 3.

2. John Rastell, The Pastyme of People: The cronycles of dyuers realmys and most specyally of
the realme ofEnglond (London, 1530), B v .

3. Griffin, Journeymen-Printers, 244.

4. J. Martinez de Bujanda (ed.), Index de LTnqusition Espagnole 1551, 1554, 155Q
(Sherbrooke, 1984), 516. For other examples of this early trade in printed protective
charms see Don C. Skemer, Binding Words: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages
(University Park, 2006), 222-33.

5. Frank L. Borchardt, 'The Magus as Renaissance Man', Sixteenth Century Journal 21:1
(1990) 60.

6. For debate on the limited originality of Renaissance magic see, for example, Richard
Kieckhefer, 'Did Magic have a Renaissance? An Historiographic Question Revis-
ited', in Charles Burnett and W. F. Ryan (eds), Magic and the Classical Tradition
(London/Turin, 2006), 199—213; Michael D. Bailey, Magic and Superstition in Europe:

Notes | 301

A Concise History from Antiquity to the Present (Lanham, 2007), 180-93; D. P. Walker,
Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London, 1958); Brian Vickers,
'Introduction', in idem (ed.), Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cam-
bridge, 1984); B. J. Gibbons, Spirituality and the Occult: From the Renaissance to the
Modern Age (London, 2001), ch. 3, esp. 41.

7. For a clear, concise outline of the Hermitic tradition see D. S. Katz, The Occult
Tradition (London, 2005), 22—35.

8. See Moshe Idel, 'Jewish Magic from the Renaissance Period to Early Hasidism', in
Jacob Neusner, Ernest S. Frerichs, and Paul Virgil McCracken Flesher (eds), Religion,
Science, and Magic: In Concert and in Conflict (New York, 1989), 82—120.

9. Benjonson, Ben Jonson's Execration against Vulcan (London, 1640), B2V.

10. Much has been written but for a range of approaches to his work see, for example,
Christopher I. Lehrich, The Language of Demons and Angels: Cornelius Agrippa's Occult
Philosophy (Leiden, 2003); Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan
Age (London, 1979); Donald Tyson (ed.), Three Books of Occult Philosophy (St Paul,
1995)-

11. See Noel L. Brann, Trithemius and Magical Theology (Albany, 1999). For a useful
discussion on the way Trithemius's work influenced the grimoire tradition see
Stephen Skinner and David Rankine, The Goetia of Dr Rudd (London, 2007), 34—6,
55-7-

12. See Ole Peter Grell (ed.), Paracelsus: The Man and His Reputation, His Ideas and Their
Transformations (Leiden, 1998).

13. Ole Peter Grell, 'Introduction', in idem (ed.), Paracelsus: The Man, 3.

14. Paracelsus, Of the supreme mysteries of nature, 96, 34, 39.

15. See, for example, Allen G. Debus, The English Paracelsians (London, 1965), 63, 75;
Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols (New York:
1923-58), vi.525.

16. William Foster, Hoplocrisma-Spongus: Or, A Sponge to Wipe Away the Weapon-Salve
(London, 163 1), 32, 34.

17. Much has been written in English and German about the literary and historic Faust.
On the historic Faust I have relied on Karl P. Wentersdorf, 'Some Observations on the
Historical Faust', Folklore 89:2 (1978), 201-23; Frank Baron, Which Faustus Died in
Staufen? History and Legend in the "Zimmerische Chronik" ', German Studies Review
6:2 (1983), 185-94.

18. Elizabeth M. Butler's The Fortunes of Faust (Cambridge, 1952) remains a formidable
account of the various literary versions of the Faust legend. On the teufelsbucher see
Gerhild Scholz Williams, 'Devil Books', in Richard Golden (ed.), Encyclopedia of
Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, 4 vols (Santa Barbara, 2006), i.274— 5; Robert
Muchembled, A History of the Devil from the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Jean
Birrell (Cambridge, 2003), 11 1-24; Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in
Baroque Germany (New Haven, 2006), 253—5; H. C. Erik Midelfort, Witch Hunting in
Southwestern Germany 1562-1684 (Stanford, 1972), 69-70.

302 I Notes

19. Henrici Cornelii Agrippae liber quartus de occulta philosophia (Marbug, 1559); Liber quartus
De occulta philosophia, seu, De ceremoniis magicis (Basel, 1565). Some historians cite 1565
or 1567 as the date of the first edition.

20. See Marc van der Poel, Cornelius Agrippa: The Humanist Theologian and His Declam-
ations (Leiden, 1997), 82 nn. 41 and 42.

21. See, for example, Richard Argentine, De Praestigiis et Incantationibus Daemonum et
Necromanticomm (Basel, 1568), 28.

22. Deborah E. Harkness, John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the
End of Nature (Cambridge, 1999), 128 n. 116.

23. Jean-Michel Sallmann, Chercheurs de tresors et jeteuses de sorts: La quite du surnatural a
Naples au XVIe Steele (Paris, 1986), 161,166.

24. William Monter, 'Toads and Eucharists: The Male Witches of Normandy,
1 564-1660', French Historical Studies 20:4 (1997), 587.

25. The Quacks Academy ; Or, The Dunce's Directory (London, 1678), 5; Richard Baxter, The
Certainty of the World of Spirits (London, 1691), 62. See also Owen Davies, Cunning-
Folk: Popular Magic in English History (London, 2003), ch. 5. I have also benefitted from
reading drafts of Matthew Green's forthcoming PhD, 'The Publication of and Interest
in Occult Literature 1640— 1680', University of Hertfordshire.

26. See Carlos Gilly, 'The First Book of White Magic in Germany', in C. Gilfy and
C. Van Heertum (eds), Magia, Alchimia, Scienza Dal '400 al '700. L'influsso di Ermete
Trismegisto / 'Magic, Alchemy and Science i$th-i8th Centuries (Florence, 2002), i. 209— 17.

27. Ibid. 210.

28. Bruce T. Moran, 'Paracelsus, Religion, and Dissent: The Case of Philipp Homagius
and Georg Zimmermann', Ambix 43:2 (1996), 65—6; Gilly, 'The First Book of White
Magic', 214.

29. Grillot de Givry, Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy (New York, [1931! 1971), 102.

30. On the continued importance of manuscript see Walsham and Crick (eds), The Uses
of Script and Print, 1300-1700.

3 1 . Sofia Messana, Inquisitori, negromanti e streghe nella Sicilia modema (1500-1 782) (Palermo,
2007), 430, 432-9. My thanks to Francesca Matteoni for bringing this book to my
attention and providing relevant details.

32. David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra
d'Otranto (Manchester, 1992), 228-9.

33. Ruth Martin, Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice 1550-1650 (Oxford, 1989), 96.

34. John Tedeschi, 'The Question of Magic and Witchcraft in Two Unpublished
Inquisitorial Manuals of the Seventeenth Century', Proceedings of the America Philosoph-
ical Society 131:1 (1987), 98; Carmel Cassar, Witchcraft, Sorcery and the Inquisition: A
Study of Cultural Values in Early Modern Malta (Msida, 1996), 58, 59; Martin, Witchcraft
and the Inquisition, 89.

35. Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions (Oxford, 1993), 208.

Notes | 303

36. Martin, Witchcraft and the Inquisition, 89, 91.

37. Ursula Lamb, 'La Inquisition en Canarias y un Libro de Magia del Siglo XVI', El
Museo Canario 24 (1963), 113—44. For other Spanish examples see, for instance, Julio
Caro Baroja, Vidas Magicas e Inquisition (Madrid, 1992), i. 135— 51, ii.280, 292; Maria
Tausiet, Abracadabra Omnipotens: Magia urbana en Zaragoza en la Edad Moderna (Madrid,
2007), 71, 72; Francois Delpech, 'Grimoires et savoirs souterrains: elements pour une
archeo-mythologie du livre magique', in Dominique de Courcelles (ed.), Le Pouvoir
des livres a la Renaissance (Paris, 1998), 45.

38. Federico Barbierato, 'Magical Literature and the Venice Inquisition from the Six-
teenth to the Eighteenth Centuries', in Gilly and Van Heertum (eds), Magia, Alchimia,
Stienza Dal'400 aU'700, 164.

39. Federico Barbierato, Nella stanza dei circoli: Clavicula Salomonis e libri di magia a Venezia
nei secoli XVII e XVIII (Milan, 2002), 165.

40. Extracts from one of the French manuscripts are presented in P. L.Jacob, Curiosites des
sciences occultes (Paris, 1862).

41. J. Buchanan-Brown, 'The Books Presented to the Royal Society by John Aubrey,
F.R.S.', Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 28:2 (1974), 192 n. 59.

42. Montague Summers, Witchcraft and Black Magic (London, [1946] 1964), 188—9;
Elizabeth M. Butler, Ritual Magic (Stroud, [1949] 1998), 310.

43. William G. Naphy, Plagues, Poisons and Potions: Plague- Spreading Conspiracies in the
Western Alps c. 1530-1640 (Manchester, 2002), 182—4; Barbierato, Nella stanza dei circoli,
79—80 n. 222.

44. The Magick of Kirani King of Persia (London, 1685), 68.

45. See William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and
Early Modern Culture (Princeton, 1994), 139—47, 252.

46. The best account of Delia Porta is ibid. 195—233.

47. Ibid. 199.

48. David Lederer, Madness, Religion and the State in Early Modern Europe: A Bavarian
Beacon (Cambridge, 2006), 216—18.

49. Henri Boguet, An Examen of Witches, trans. E Allen Ashwin (London, [1929] 1971),
180-93.

50. Thorndike, History of Magic, vi. 556-9; Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit:
Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago, 2007), 78;
Gentilcore, Bishop to witch, 107— 11.

51. Barbierato, 'Magical Literature', 160.

52. Laura de Mello e Souza, The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross: Witchcraft, Slavery,
and Popular Religion in Colonial Brazil, trans. Diane Grosklaus Whitty (Austin, 2003),
109-11, 166. On Brugnoli see Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit, 49.

53. A similar point is made in Sarah Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern
France (London, 2004), 38-9.

304 I Notes

54. K. M. Briggs, 'Some Seventeenth-Century Books of Magic', Folklore 64:4 (1953),
445—62; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971), 271—3, 727;
Barbara A. Mowat, 'Prospero's Book', Shakespeare Quarterly 52:1 (2001), 1—33; Davies,
Cunning-Folk, ch. 5; Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy
Stories (London, 2000), 127—31; Robert Hunter West, The Invisible World: A Study of
Pneumatology in Elizabethan Drama (Athens, GA, 1939), ch. 7.

55. Butler, Ritual Magic, 251.

56. George Lyman Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and New England (New York, [1929] 1958),
208; Briggs, 'Some Seventeenth-Century Books of Magic', 448. 'Andrew Malchus'
is probably an anglicization of a spirit named Andromalius found in some versions
of the Eemegeton; see Mowat, 'Prospero's Book', n. 50.

57. Cited in Mowat, 'Prospero's Book', 14; Briggs, 'Some Seventeenth-Century Books of
Magic', 457.

58. William Lilly, William Lilly's History of His Life and Times from the Year 1602 to 1681, ed.
Elias Ashmole (London, 1721), 108; Katharine Briggs, A Dictionary of Fairies (London,
1976), 276.

59. Thomas Jackson, A Treatise Concerning the Originall ofUnbeliefe (London, 1625), 178—9.

60. Keith Thomas was the first to introduce this idea in his Religion and the Decline of Magic.

61 . For discussion on clerical educational levels and behaviour see, for example, Reinhold
Kiermayr, 'On the Education of the Pre-Reformation Clergy', Church History 53:1
(1984), 7—16; R. N. Swanson, 'Problems of the Priesthood in Pre-Reformation
England', English Historical Review 105:417 (1990), 845-69.

62. Geoffrey Parker, 'Success and Failure during the First Century of the Reformation',
Past and Present 136 (1992), 55-8.

63. Luise Schorn-Schutte, 'The Christian Clergy in the Early Modern Holy Roman
Empire: A Comparative Social Study', Sixteenth Century Journal 29:3 (1998), 723;
Rosemary O'Day, The Professions in Early Modern England, 1450-1800: Servants of the
Commonweal (Harlow, 2000), 68—9.

64. Gentilcore, Bishop to witch, 42, 131; Mary O'Neill, 'Magical Healing, Love Magic, and
the Inquisition in Late Sixteenth Century Italy', in Stephen Haliczer (ed.), Inquisition
and Society in Early Modern Europe (Totowa, 1987), 88—114, es P- 93-

65. Schorn-Schutte, 'The Christian Clergy', 724.

66. See J. Michael Hayden and Malcolm R. Greenshields, 'The Clergy of Early Seven-
teenth-Century France: Self-Perception and Society's Perception', French Historical
Studies 18:1 (1993), 145-72.

67. Sallmann, Chercheurs, 145.

68. See, for example, Wilfred Prest (ed.), The Professions in Early Modern England (London,
1987).

69. Cassar, Witchcraft, Sorcery, 60.

70. See David Pingree (ed.), Picatrix: The Latin Version of the Ghayat al-Haklm (London,
1986), pp. xix, liii— lv.

Notes | 305

71. See Alec Ryrie, The Sorcerer's Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England (Oxford, 2008),
ch. 4.

72. Lauren Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London. Simon Forman: Astrologer,
Alchemist and Physician (Oxford, 2005), 215, 216, 218.

73. Bernardo Barreiro de Vazquez Varela, Brujos y astrologos de la Inquisicion de Galicia y el
jamoso libro de San Cipriano (Madrid, [1885] 1973), 155—60; Tayra M. C. Lanuza-
Navarro and Ana Cecilia Avalos-Flores, 'Astrological Prophecies and the Inquisition
in the Iberian World', in M. Kokowski (ed.), The Global and the Local: The History of
Science and the Cultural Integration of Europe (Cracow, 2006), 684.

74. Robin Briggs, 'Circling the Devil: Witch-Doctors and Magical Healers in Early
Modern Lorraine', in Stuart Clark (ed.), Languages of Witchcraft (Basingstoke, 2001),
171— 2.

75. Paris BN, Ms. fr. 19574, 28—66; Discoverie admirable d'un magicien de la ville de Moulins
(Paris, 1623); Jean Debordes, Les Mysteres de VAllier: histories insolite, estranges, criminelles
et extraordinaires (Romagnat, 2001), ch. 11.

76. See, for example, Bruce Tolley, Pastors and Parishioners in Wurttemberg during the Late
Reformation 1581—1621 (Stanford, 1995), 68, 69; Wolfgang Behringer, Shaman of
Oberstdorf, trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort (Charlottesville, 1998), esp. 7, 87; Claude et
Jacques Seignolle, Le folklore du Hurepoix (Paris, 1978), 211-12.

77. Monter, 'Toads and Eucharists'.

78. Ibid. 577.

79. Thomas Tryon, Miscellania (London, 1696), 93; David Cressy, Literacy and the Social
Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980), 39.

80. Davies, Cunning-Folk, 129.

81. Briggs, 'Circling the Devil', 171.

82. Peter A. Morton (ed.), The Trial of Tempel Anneke, trans. Barbara Dahms (Peterborough,
Ont., 2006), 15, 19, 39, 78.

83. Edward Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in Early Modern Europe:
Culture, Cognition and Everyday Life (Basingstoke, 2008), ch. 6.

84. Davies, Cunning-Folk, 73; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 362.

85. Cassar, Witchcraft, Sorcery, 67, 68, 72-3, 98.

86. Rene Le Tenneur, Magie, sorcellerie et fantastique en Normandie (Paris, 1991), 176-7.

87. Martin, Witchcraft and the Inquisition, 98,135—6; Matteo Duni, Under the Devil's Spell:
Witches, Sorcerers, and the Inquisition in Renaissance Italy (Florence, 2007), 56—7.

88. Kingjames I, Doemonologie, Preface.

89. Cited in van der Poel, Cornelius Agrippa, 82 n. 42.

90. Nicolas Remy, La demonoldtrie, trans Jean Boes (Nancy, 1997), 196. In the only English
translation of the book 'Picatrix' is supplanted by 'Weyer' for some reason: Remy,
Demonolatry, trans. E. A. Ashwin (London, 1930), 100.

91. Thorndike, History of Magic, viii.556.

306 | Notes

92. Martin Del Rio, Investigations into Magic, ed. and trans. P.G. Maxwell-Stuart
(Manchester, 2000), 76, 77.

93. Del Rio, Investigations, 237; Raymond A. Mentzer, 'Heresy Proceedings inLanguedoc,
1 500-1650', Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 74:5 (1984), 37-8.

94. Del Rio, Investigations, 27.

95. D. A. Beecher, 'Erotic Love and the Inquisition: Jacques Ferrand and the Tribunal of
Toulouse, 1620', Sixteenth Century Journal 20:1 (1989), 41—53.

96. Benjamin G. Kohl and H. C. Erik Midelfort (eds), On Witchcraft: An Abridged
Translation of Johann Weyer's De prsestigiis daemonum, trans. John Shea (Asheville,
1998), 54-8-

97. Ibid. 203; Skinner and Rankine, The Goetia, 37.

98. Barbierato, Nella stanza del circoli, 52, 162.

99. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London, 1584), 226, 251.

100. Frank Klaassen and Christopher Phillips, 'The Return of Stolen Goods: Reginald
Scot, Religious Controversy, and Magic in Bodleian Library, Additional B. 1', Magic,
Ritual, and Witchcraft 1:2 (2006), 135—77.

101. Davies, Cunning-Folk, 125-7, : 3 2 > J 34i 150-1, I56 _ 9-

102. On the trial of Scottish cunning-folk see Owen Davies, 'A Comparative Perspective on
Scottish Cunning-Folk and Charmers', in Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, and Joyce
Miller (eds), Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland (Basingstoke, 2008), 185—205.

103. Per Sorlin, 'Wicked Arts': Witchcraft and Magic Trials in Southern Sweden, 1635—1734
(Leiden, 1999), 35—6; William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland (Ithaca,
1976), 186—7.

104. Magnus Rafnsson, Angurgapi: The Witch-Hunts in Iceland (Holmavik, 2003), 53; Olina
Fiorvardardottir, 'Iceland', in Golden (ed.), Encyclopedia, ii.533; Kirsten Hastrup,
'Iceland: Sorcerers and Paganism', in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen
(eds), Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford, 1993), 390.

105. Rafnsson, Angurgapi, 56, 58.

106. Stephen E. Flowers, The Galdrabok: An Icelandic Book of Magic, 2nd edn (Smithville,
2005), 55; Rafnsson, Angurgapi, 46; Hastrup, 'Iceland: Sorcerers and Paganism', 394—5.

107. Fiorvardardottir, 'Iceland', ii.533.

108. The point is well made in Julian Goodare, 'Introduction', in idem (ed.), The Scottish
Witch-Hunt in Context (Manchester, 2002), 27.

109. Ibid. 28—9. On concerns over Saami magic see Stephen Mitchell, 'Learning Magic in
the Sagas', in Geraldine Barnes and Margaret Clunies Ross (eds), Old Norse Myths,
Literature and Society (Sydney, 2000), 336.

no. See Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western
Culture and Society (Bloomington/Indianapolis, 1987), 227—30.

in. Rafnsson, Angurgapi, p. 60.

112. Rafnsson, Angurgapi, 23, 60—1.

Notes | 307

113. Kevin C. Robbins, 'Magical Emasculation, Popular Anticlericalism, and the Limits of
the Reformation in Western France circa 1 590' , Journal of Social History 31:1 (1997),
66. On the French ligature tradition see also Stephen Wilson, The Magical Universe
(London, 2000), 140.

114. Pierre De Lancre, On the Inconstancy of Witches, trans. Harriet Stone and Gerhild
Scholz Williams (Tempe, 2006), 510, 506.

115. Monter, 'Toads and Eucharists', 576.

116. See Ferber, Demonic Possession, ch. 5.

117. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book, trans. David Gerard
(London, [1958] 1976), 244-5.

118. Thorndike, History of Magic, vi. 146-58; Paul F. Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and
the Venetian Press, 1340-1605 (Princeton, 1977), passim.

119. Barbierato, 'Magical Literature', 159. See also Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, 'Some Con-
jectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought: A Prelim-
inary Report', Journal of Modern History 40:1 (1968), 38.

120. Bujanda (ed.), Index de LTnqusition Espagnole, 243-4, 365-6; J. Martinez Bujanda,
'Indices de libros prohibidos del siglo XVI', in Joaquin Perez Villanueva and
Bartolome Escandell Bonet (eds), Historia de la Inquisiciobn en Espaha y America
(Madrid, 2000), 798, 800.

121. For an overview see Virgilio Pinto Crespo, 'Thought Control in Spain', in Haliczer
(ed.), Inquisition and Society, 171—88.

122. See Moshe Lazar, 'Scorched Parchments and Tortured Memories: The "Jewishness"
of the Anussim (Crypto-Jews) ' , in Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz (eds),
Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World (Berkeley,
I 99 I )> 176—206.

123. See Paul F. Grendler, 'The Destruction of Hebrew Books in Venice, 1568', Proceed-
ings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 45 (1978), 103-30.

124. David H. Darst, 'Witchcraft in Spain: The Testimony of Martin de Castanega's
Treatise on Superstition and Witchcraft (1529)', Proceedings of the American Philosoph-
ical Society 123:5 (1979), 319.

125. See Jeffrey Howard, Between Worlds: Dybukks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism
(Philadelphia, 2003), esp. 64; R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and
Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven, 1990), 134—5.

126. Georges Mongredien, Leonora Galigai: Un process de sorcellerie sous Louis XIII (Paris,
1968), 74.

127. Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion (New
York, 1939), 140.

128. Martin, Witchcraft and the Inquisition, 98.

129. Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini, Jews, Crypto-Jews, and the Inquisition', in Robert
Charles Davis and Benjamin Ravid (eds), The Jews of Early Modern Venice (Baltimore,
2001), 114-15.

308 | Notes

130. Brian Pullan, The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice, 1550-1670 (London,
[1983] 1997), 306.

131. Valerie Molero, Magie et sorcellerie en Espagne au Steele des Lumieres 1700-1820 (Paris,
2006), 161.

132. William Monter, Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisition from the Basque Eands to
Sicily (Cambridge, 1990), 214.

133. Cassar, Witchcraft, Sorcery, 75.

134. Cited in Henry Kamen, The Phoenix and the Flame: Catalonia and the Couunter-
Reformation (New Haven, 1985), 219.

135. Ibid. 224, 232—6; Griffin, Journeymen-Printers, 10, 12 n. 42; Gustav Henningsen, The
Witches' Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition (Reno, 1980), 49.

136. Raymond A. Mentzer, Jr, 'The Legal Response to Heresy in Languedoc, 1500-1560',
Sixteenth Century Journal 4:1 (1973), 23-4, 26-8; Alfred Soman, 'Press, Pulpit, and
Censorship in France before Richelieu', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
120:6 (1976), 439-63-

137. For a detailed account of the case see Tausiet, Abracadabra Omnipotens, 46-57.

138. Ibid. 71; Monter, Frontiers of Heresy, 222-3.

139. Henningsen, Witches' Advocate, 120—3. On De Lancre and his work see P. G.
Maxwell-Stuart, Witch Hunters (Stroud, 2005), ch. 2.

140. Jean Bodin, Ea Demonomanie des Sorciers (Paris, 1580), 17V; quote cited in Charlotte
Wells, 'Leeches on the Body Politic: Xenophobia and Witchcraft in Early Modern
French Political Thought', French Historical Studies 22:3 (1999), 363—4.

141. Reproduced in Edouard Fournier (ed.), Varietes historiques et litteraires (Paris, 1855),
i.90, 91.

142. De Lancre, On the Inconstancy of Witches, 361, 362.

143. Barbierato, 'Magical Literature', 161.

144. Kamen, Phoenix and the Flame, 389—94.

145. Grendler, Roman Inquisition, 186—8; Barbierato, 'Magical Literature', 161.

146. Sally Scully, 'Marriage or a Career?: Witchcraft as an Alternative in Seventeenth-
Century Venice', Journal of Social History 28:4 (1995), 857-76, esp. 861, 871.

147. Francisco Bethencourt, O imagindrio da magia: Feiticeiras adivinhos e curandeiros em
Portugal no seculo XVI (Sao Paulo, [1987] 2004), 169-70.

148. See O'Neill, 'Magical Healing, Love Magic'; Guido Ruggiero, Binding Passions
(Oxford, 1993), esp. ch. 3; Scully, 'Marriage or a Career?'; Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra,
'Witchcraft after the Witch-Trials', in Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Brian P. Levack,
and Roy Porter (eds), Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries (London, 1999), 129-41.

149. Jonathan Walker, 'Gambling and Venetian Noblemen c. 1 500-1700', Past and
Present, 162 (1999), 47.

Notes | 309

150. Tedeschi, 'The Question of Magic and Witchcraft in Two Unpublished Inquisitorial
Manuals', 100.

151. Maria Pia Fantini, 'Les mots secrets des prostituees (Modene, 1580— 1620)', Parler,
chanter, lire, ecrire 11 (2000).

152. Mrs Gutch, 'Saint Martha and the Dragon', Folklore 63:4 (1952), 193-203.

153. Olga Lucia Valbuena, 'Sorceresses, Love Magic, and the Inquisition of Linguistic
Sorcery in Celestina', PMLA 109:2 (1994), 218. For examples of other such saintly
love prayers recorded in Inquisition documents see Bartomeu Prohens Perello,
Inquisicio I Bruixeria A Mallorca (1578-1650) Palma, 1995), 94-6; Martin, Witchcraft
and the Inquisition, 108—9.

154. Graff, Legacies of Literacy, 149; Paul F. Grendler, Renaissance Education between Religion
and Politics (Aldershot, 2006), 255.

155. Ruggiero, Binding Passions, 99—102. A similar tradition existed in Spain and Portugal
where they were called cartas de tocar; see for the latter country Francisco Bethen-
court, 'Portugal: A Scrupulous Inquisition', in Ankarloo and Henningsen (eds), Early
Modern European Witchcraft, 412, 413.

156. Fantini, 'Les mots secrets', n. 35.

157. Scully, 'Marriage or a Career?', 861. Two of the copies confiscated from Malipiero's
house survive and have been analysed in Barbierato, 'Magical Literature', 167-9.
Images from them can be found in Barbierato, Nella stanza dei circoli, plates between
168 and 169. Barbierato, 'Magical Literature', 173.

158. Cited in Ruggiero, Binding Passions, 211.

159. See Roper, Witch Craze, ch. 4; Francois Delpech, 'La "marque" des sorcieres: logique
(s) de la stigmatisation diabolique', in Nicole Jaques-Chaquin and Maxime Preud
(eds), Le sabbat des sorciers (Grenoble, 1993), 347-69; Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers:
Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago, 2002), esp. ch. 1.

160. Cited in Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium Maleficarum, trans. E. A. Ashwin
(New York, [1929] 1988), 135. See also Delpech, 'Grimoires et savoirs souter-
rains', 34.

161. The theological conceptions of most acts of Devil worship were constructed from
inversions of Christian worship; see Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of
Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997), 80-93. On the Book of Life see, for
example, Gregory K. Beale, The Book of Revelation: A Commentary on the Greek Text
(Grand Rapids, 1999), 281-2.

162. Richard Bernard, A Guide to Grand-iury Men (London, 1627), 110.

163. C. L'Estrange Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism (London, 1933), 280.

164. Cited in Elizabeth Reis, 'Gender and the Meanings of Confession in Early New
England', in eadem (ed.), Spellbound: Women and Witchcraft in America (Wilmington,
1998), 58.

165. Ewen, Witchcraft and Demonianism, 274, 300; Istvan Gyorgy Toth, Literacy and Written
Culture in Early Modem Central Europe (Budapest, 2000), 89-91.

310 | Notes

1 66. See Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 62-103.

167. Edward Variance, ' "An Holy and Sacramentall Paction": Federal Theology and the
Solemn League and Covenant in England', English Historical Review 1 16 (2001), 71—2;
Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfnders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (London, 2005),
47—8. On the notion of the witch's book in nineteenth-century folklore see Owen
Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture 1736-1951 (Manchester, 1999), 180-1.

168. Doctor Lamb revived, or, Witchcraft condemn'd in Anne Bodenham (London, 1653), 26.

169. Otis H. Green and Irvine A. Leonard, 'On the Mexican Booktrade in 1600: A Chapter
in Cultural History', Hispanic Review 9:1 (1941), 1—40. On the smuggling of prohibited
books see Carmen val Julian, 'Surveiller et punir le livre en Nouvelle-Espagne au
XVIe siecle', in de Courcelles (ed.), Le Pouvoir des livres a la Renaissance, 100-7.

170. Ana Avalos, 'As Above, So Below: Astrology and the Inquisition in Seventeenth-
Century New Spain', PhD thesis, European University Institute (2007), ch. 5.

171. Richard E. Greenleaf, Zumarraga and the Mexican Inquisition 1536-1543 (Washington,
1961), 117.

172. James E. Wadsworth, 'In the Name of the Inquisition: The Portuguese Inquisition and
Delegated Authority in Colonial Pernambuco, Brazil', The Americas 61:1 (2004), 47;
Carole A. Myscofski, 'The Magic of Brazil: Practice and Prohibition in the Early
Colonial Period 1 590-1620' , History of Religions 40:2 (2000), 162-3, l6 4- Foradetailed
survey see de Mello e Souza, The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross. For useful
comparative overviews of witchcraft, magic and the American Inquisitions see
William Monter, Ritual, Myth and Magic in Early Modern Europe (Brighton, 1983),
ch. 6; Gustav Henningsen, 'The Diffusion of European Magic in Colonial America',
in Jens Christian V. Johansen, Erling Ladewig Petersen, and Henrik Stevnsborg (eds),
Clashes of Cultures: Essays in Honour of Niels Steensgaard (Odense, 1992), 160-78.

173. Teodoro Hampe-Martinez, 'Recent Works on the Inquisition and Peruvian
Colonial Society, 1570— 1820', Latin American Research Review, 31:2 (1996), 44, 45.

174. Paulino Castaheda Delgado and Pilar Hernandez Aparicio, La Inquisicion de Lima
(1570-1635) (Madrid, 1989), i. 376-7, 380; Henningsen, 'The Diffusion of European
Magic', 163; Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, The History of the Incas, trans, and ed.
Brian S. Bauer and Jean-Jacques Decoster (Austin, 2007), 6.

175. Delgado and Aparicio, La Inquisicion de Lima, 378; Henningsen, 'The Diffusion of
European Magic', 164.

176. Donald G. Castanien, 'The Mexican Inquisition Censors: A Private Library, 1655',
Hispanic American Historical Review 34:3 (1954), 374-92; Avalos, 'As Above, So
Below', 211-35.

177. Greenleaf, Zumarraga and the Mexican Inquisition, 11 7-21.

178. Avalos, 'As Above, So Below', 246-54; Myscofski, 'The Magic of Brazil', 164;
Lanuza-Navarro and Avalos-Flores, 'Astrological Prophecies', 685—8.

179. Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized
World (Durham, 2004), 270 n. 18.

Notes | 311

180. Henningsen, 'The Diffusion of European Magic', 164.

181. De Mello e Souza, The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross, 98.

182. C. A. Browne, 'Scientific Notes from the Books and Letters of John Winthrop, Jr.,
(1606-1676)', Isis 11:2 (1928), 325-42; Arthur Versluis, The Esoteric Origins of the
American Renaissance (New York, 2000), 31-6.

183. Jon Butler, 'Thomas Teackle's 333 Books: A Great Library on Virginia's Eastern
Shore, 1697', William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 49:3 (1992), 449-91.

184. See David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early
New England (New York, 1989), 41-61;

185. Richard Godbeer, The Devil's Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England
(Cambridge, 1992), 35—6; William Renwick Riddell, 'Witchcraft in Old New York',
Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 19:2 (1928), 252-8.

186. Godbeer, The Devil's Dominion, 135-6.

187. John Hale, A Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft (1702).

188. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, The Salem Witchcraft Papers (New York 1977),
vol. ii. I have made use of the online edition available at http://etext.virginia.edu/
salem/ witchcraft/ texts/BoySal2.html

189. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 98-9.

190. Peter Benes, 'Fortunetellers, Wise-Men, and Magical Healers in New England,
1644-1850', in idem (ed.), Wonders of the Invisible World: 1600-1800 (Boston, 1995),
127-42; Godbeer, Devil's Dominion, 33-7; John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan:
Witchcraft and the Culture of Early Modern England (Oxford, 1982), 80—4.

191. Reis (ed.), Spellbound, p. xv.

192. Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of i6g2 (New
York, 2002), 52; Michelle Burnham, Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing
in the World System (Hanover, NH, 2007), 162. On early American astrological
almanacs see Godbeer, The Devil's Dominion, ch. 4.

193. Toth, Literacy, go.

194. Emerson W. Baker, 'Maine Indian Land Speculation and the Essex County
Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692', Maine History 40:3 (2001), 159-89; Norton, In the
Devil's Snare, 240.

195. Burnham, Folded Selves, 162-4.

196. George Lincoln Burr (ed.), Narratives of the New England Witchcraft Cases (Mineola,
[19 14] 2002), 262-3.

197. F. W. Grubb, 'Growth of Literacy in Colonial America: Longitudinal Patterns,
Economic Models, and the Direction of Future Research', Social Science History
14:4 (1990), 451-82; Graff, Legacies of Literacy, 163-4.

198. See the collected essays in Alfred Soman, Sorcellerie et justice criminelle: le Parlement de
Paris (i6e-i8e siecles) (Aldershot, 1992); Brian Levack, 'The Decline and End of

312 I Notes

Witchcraft Prosecutions', in Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (eds), Witchcraft and
Magic in Europe: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London, 1999), esp. 48—53.

199. The story of the affair is well told in Anne Somerset, The Affair of the Poisons: Murder,
Infanticide and Satanism at the Court of Louis XIV (London, 2003). On the magical
aspects of the affair see Lynn Wood Mollenauer, Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison,
and Sacrilege in Louis XIV s France (University Park, 2007).

200. Francois Ravaisson, Archives de la Bastille, 19 vols (Paris, 1866-1904), vi.32, 186, 194.

201. Mollenauer, Strange Revelations, 104.

202. Ibid. 78.

203. Ravaisson, Archives de la Bastille, vi.184.

Ill Enlightenment and Treasure

1. H. C. Erik Midelfort, Exorcism and Enlightenment: fohann foseph Gassner and the
Demons of Eighteenth-Century Germany (New Haven, 2005), 22.

2. For discussion on the magical activities of Cagliostro and Casanova see respectively,
Iain McCalman, The Last Alchemist: Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in the Age of
Reason (New York, 2003); Chantal Thomas, 'Giacomo Casanova: Three Episodes
from his Life as a Charlatan', Cultural and Social History 3:3 (2006), 355-69; Elizabeth
M. Butler, Ritual Magic (Stroud, [1949] 1998), 129-48.

3. B. J. Gibbons, Spirituality and the Occult: From the Renaissance to the Modem Age
(London, 2001), 85.

4. Giacomo Casanova, Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt (London, 1894), vol. v,
ch. 21 . I have used the version available via Project Gutenberg. See also Butler, Ritual
Magic, 129-48.

5. See http://levity.com/alchemy/alnwick.html for a list of his manuscripts.

6. See Genevieve Bolleme, La Bible hleue (Paris, 1975); Lise Andries, La Bibliotheque
bleue au dix-huiteme siecle (Oxford, 1989).

7. Anne Sauvy, Livres saisis a Paris entre 1678 et lyoi (The Hague, 1972), 13, 321.

8. 'Memoire de M. d'Argenson sur les associations de faux sorciers a Paris en 1702',
reproduced in Robert Mandrou (ed.), Possession et sorcellerie au XVIIe siecle (Paris,
1979), 279-328.

9. Ulrike Krampl, 'When Witches Became False: Seducteurs and Credules Confront the
Paris Police at the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century', in Kathryn A. Edwards
(ed.), Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Belief and Folklore in Early
Modern Europe (Kirksville, 2002), 138 n. 5.

10. Ibid. 153 n.65.

11. 'Memoire de M. d'Argenson', 327.

12. Francois Ravaisson, Archives de la Bastille, 19 vols (Paris, 1866— 1904), xii.io.

Notes | 313

13. Ibid, x.273.

14. 'Memoire de M. d'Argenson', 292—4.

15. Ibid. 285-6, 292.

16. Ravaisson, Archives, x.333. For other references to the Honorius grimoire see also
'Memoire de M. d'Argenson', 303.

17. Ravaisson, Archives, xiii.461.

18. 'Memoire de M. d'Argenson', 325.

19. Ibid. 297, 310, 303-4,

20. Marc Antoine Rene de Voyer d'Argenson, Melange tires d'une grande bibliotheque. De La
Lecture des livres Francois (Paris, 1781), 99-104. A survey of his grimoire collection is
provided in Grillot de Givry, Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy (New York, [1931] 1971),
102-13.

21. Jane P. Davidson, 'Bordelon, Laurent (1653-1710)', in Richard Golden (ed.), Encyclo-
pedia of Witchcraft: The Western Tradition, 4 vols (Santa Barbara, 2006), i.138.

22. L'Histoire des imaginations extravagantes de Monsieur Oufie (Amsterdam, 1710), 9.

23. For general accounts see Charles Nisard, Histoire des livres populaires (Paris, 1854), vol. i,
ch. 3; Charles Lancelin, La Sorcellerie des campagnes (Paris, 191 1), 341-56. An important
source of bibliographic information is Albert Caillet, Manuel bibliographique des sciences
psychiques ou occultes, 3 vols (Paris, 1912).

24. Daniele Roche, 'Les pratiques de l'ecrit dans les villes francaises du XVIIIe siecle', in
Roger Chariter (ed.), Pratiques de la lecture (Paris, [1985] 2003), 210— 11.

25. Francois Lebrun, Se soigner autrefois: Medicins, saints et sorciers aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles
(Paris, 1995), 100.

26. The name was presumably an allusion to the Beringen Brothers, German printers in
sixteenth-century Lyon; see Clive Griffin, Journeymen-Printers, Heresy, and the Inquisi-
tion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Oxford, 2005), 121, 122.

27. Genevieve Bolleme, La Bible bleue (Paris, 1975), 396.

28. 'Memoire de M. d'Argenson', 325.

29. Le solide tresor des merveilleux secrets de la magie naturelle et cabalistique (Geneva, 1704). On
the date of the earliest edition see Lise Andries, Le grand Livre des Secrets: Le colportage en
France aux 17c et i8e siecles (Paris, 1994), 184; Nicolas Prevost and Company, Duo
catalogi librorum (London, 1730), 48; Jacque-Charles Brunet, Manuel du libraire et de
V amateur de livres (Paris, i860), vol. i, cols 139-40.

30. Jean-Pierre Marby, 'Le prix des choses ordinaries, du travail et du peche: le livre de
raison de Ponce Millet, 1673— 1725', Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 48:4
(2001), 21.

31. M. Ventre, LTmprimerie et la librarie en Languedoc au dernier siecle de I'Ancien Regime 1 700-
1789 (Paris, 1958), 262— 3 ; Jean-Pierre Pinies, Figures de la sorcellerie (Paris, 1983), 58.

32. Frank Baker, 'Anthropological Notes on the Human Hand', American Anthropologist
1:1 (1888), 55-9. For a list of twentieth-century fictional and cultural references

314 I Notes

see the Wikipedia entry for 'Hand of Glory': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Hand_of_Glory.

33. This section in the Petit Albert borrows heavily from a French version of the pseudo-
Paracelsian work, Paracelsus of the Supreme Mysteries of Nature (London, 1655), 64-70.

34. For images of an early-eighteenth-century manuscript version and its publication
history see http://www.librairierossignol.fr/catalogue/ fiche.php?Rech=reference&-
param=enchiridion

35. Les secrets merveilleux de la magie naturelle du Petit Albert (Paris, 1990), 102.

36. Jules Garinet, Histoire de la Magie en France (Paris, 1818), 287.

37. Eloise Mozzani, Magie et superstitions de la fin de I'Ancien Regime a la Restauration (Paris,
1988), 57-8; Gibbons, Spirituality and the Occult, 122; Kurt Koch, Between Christ and
Satan (Grand Rapids, 1962), 132.

38. See Mozzani, Magie et superstitions.

39. Nisard, Histoire des livres populates, 175; Dragon rouge (Paris, 1866).

40. J.-A.-S. Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire des Sciences Occultes (Paris, 1861), i.487.

41. Thomas Frognall Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France
and Germany, 2nd edn (London, 1829), ii. 360-1.

42. Tablettes du clerge et des amis de la religion (Paris, 1823), iv.257-8.

43. The bookshop purchase of the Dragon rouge makes an anachronistic appearance in the
adventure novel Jean le Trouveur (1 849) written by Paul de Musset, brother of the more
celebrated writer and librarian Alfred. Set during and after the War of Spanish
Succession (1701— 14), Jean seeks a copy of the Clavicules of Solomon and goes to a
bookshop in Montpellier, but is told that the Clavicule can only be obtained in
Memphis. The bookshop owner suggests instead that he purchase published copies
of the Grand grimoire and the Dragon rouge. Jean buys both immediately and sets out
following their instructions.

44. Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire des sciences occultes (1848), cols. 336—7.

45. M. Des Essarts, Choix de nouvelles causes celebres avec les jugemens (Paris, 1785), 26-41.

46. Christian Desplat, Sorcieres et diables en Beam (Pau, 1988), 218.

47. Jacques-Louis Menetra, Journal of My Life, with an introduction and commentary by
Daniel Roche (New York, 1986), 255.

48. Gremoire du Pape Honorius (c. 1800), 75.

49. See Owen Davies, 'French Healing Charms and Charmers', in Jonathan Roper (ed.),
Charms and Charming in Europe (Palgrave, 2004), 91— 113; Oskar Ebermann, 'Le
Medecin des Pauvres', Zeitschrift des Vereins fur Volkskunde 2 (1914), 134—62.

50. Des Essarts, Choix de nouvelles, vi.347.

51. Ibid. 348.

52. The Times, 21 August 1829; Judith Devlin, The Superstitious Mind: French Peasants and
the Supernatural in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, 1987), 167, 168.

Notes | 315

53. See Daniel Fabre, 'Le livre et sa magie', in Roger Chartier (ed.), Pratiques de la lecture
(Paris, [1985] 1993), 247-55.

54. The Times, 13 August 1884.

55. Pinies, Figures de la sorcellerie, 62.

56. Indice General de Los Libros Prohibidos (Madrid, 1844), 151, 312.

57. Catalogo dei Llibri die si Trovano Vendibili presso Giuseppe Molini (Florence, 1820), 195,
219, 229.

58. Alfons de Cock, 'Tooverboeken en Geestenbezwering', in Studien en essays over oude
Volksvertelsels (Antwerp, 1919), 239 (thanks to Willem de Blecourt for providing a
copy of this chapter); S. C. Curtis, 'Trials for Witchcraft in Guernsey', Reports and
Transactions of La Societe Guernesiase 13 (1937), 9—41; Christine Ozanne, 'Notes on
Guernsey Folklore', Folklore 26:2 (1915), 195; Marie-Sylvie Dupont-Bouchat, 'Le
diable apprivoise: la sorcellerie revisitee. Magie et sorcellerie au XIXe siecle', in
Robert Muchembled (ed.), Magie et sorcellerie en Europe du moyen age a nos jours (Paris,
1994), 239-

59. W. Deonna, 'Superstitions a Geneve aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles', Schweizerisches
Archiv fur Volkskunde 43 (1946), 367-8.

60. Ibid. 366, 369-70.

61. Ibid. 371-2, 383.

62. Archives d'Etat, Geneva, P.C. 12420.

63. Deonna, 'Superstitions a Geneve', 359—62.

64. Valerie Molero, Magie et sorcellerie en Espagne au siecle des Lumieres 1700—1820 (Paris,
2006), 174.

65. Ibid. 159.

66. Indice General de Los Libros Prohibidos (Madrid, 1848), 18, 276.

67. P. Fontes da Costa, 'Between Fact and Fiction: Narratives of Monsters in Eighteenth-
Century Portugal', Portuguese Studies 20:1 (2004), 71.

68. Molero, Magie, 157.

69. Ibid. 102, 165, 174. For a later example of a French grimoire being brought over, see
H. Lafoz, 'El Libro de San Cipriano en la Ribaborza, Sobrare y Somonto', Primer
congreso de Aragon de etnologia y antropologia (Zaragoza, 1981), 70. My thanks to Enrique
Perdiguero for supplying a copy of the latter.

70. See Zosa Szajkowski, 'Population Problems of Marranos and Sephardim in France,
from the 16th to the 20th Centuries', Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish
Research2j (1958), 83— 105; Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity
to the Present (1999), 47—58; Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision
(New Haven, 1998), 301-2.

71. Molero, Magie, 237.

72. Francois Bordes, Sorciers et sorcieres: Proces de sorcellerie en Gascogne et pays Basque
(Toulouse, 1999), 169, 179-80; idem, 'Le livre des remedes de Labadie', Bulletin de la

316 | Notes

Societe de Borda (1982), 399—412; D. Chabas, La sorcelkrie et I'insolite dans les Landes et les
pays voisins (Cape Breton, 1983), 95. See also Desplat, Sorcieres et diables, 124; Bernard
Traimond, Le pouvoir de la maladie: Magie et politique dans les Landes de Gascogne
1750-1826 (Bordeaux, 1988), 183.

73. Chabas, La sorcellerie, 84, 95; Bordes, Sortiers, 180.

74. Chabas, La sorcellerie, 86.

75. Cited in Desplat, Sorcieres et diables, 164.

76. The case is discussed in Bernard Traimond, Le pouvoir de la maladie: Magie et politique
dans les Landes de Gascogne 1750-1826 (Bordeaux, 1988), 89-153.

77. Ibid, no; Gremoire du Pape Honorius (c. 1800 [1995]), 40.

78. Molero, Magie, 165, 166.

79. Felix Francisco Castro Vicente, 'El Libro de San Cipriano (I)', Hibris 27 (2005), 15.

80. Peter Missler, 'Las hondas rakes del Ciprianillo. 2? parte: los grimorios', Culturas Popu-
lares. Revista Electronica 3 (Septiembre-Diciembre 2006), fn 6.

81. Indice General de Los Libros Prohibidos, 252.

82. Cited in Desplat, Sorcieres et diables, 63, 64.

83. Bernardo Barreiro de Vazquez Varela, Brujos y astrologos de la Inquisicion de Galicia y el
famoso libro de San Cipriano (Madrid, [1885] 1973), 259-88.

84. Devlin, Superstitious Mind, 167, 179-80.

85. For its bibliographic history see Vicente, 'El Libro de San Cipriano (I)', 15—25; idem,
'El Libro de San Cipriano (II), Hibris 28 (2005), 32-41.

86. Vicente Risco, 'Los tesoros legendarios de Galicia', Revista de Dialectologia y Tradiciones
Populares 6 (1950), 191; Missler, 'Las hondas rakes del Ciprianillo ' .

87. Boletin Bibliografico Espanol y Estrangero (Madrid, 1847), viii.346.

88. Rosa Seeleman, 'Folklore Elements in Valle-Inclan' , Hispanic Review 3:2 (1935),
111-12.

89. See Risco, 'Los tesoros legendarios', 185-213, 403-29; H. W. Howes, 'Gallegan
Folklore IF, Folklore 38:4 (1927), 365.

90. Risco, 'Los tesoros legendarios', 202—3, 4 2 6.

91. Julio Caro Baroja, Les falsificaciones en la historia (Barcelone, 1992), 119-20; Manuel
Barrios Aguilera, 'Tesoros moriscos y picaresca', Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, 4th ser., 9
(1996), 11—24; Danielle Provansal, 'Tesoros y aparaciones: La prohibicion de la
Riqueza', Demofilo, Revista de cultura tradicional de Andaluda 15 (1995), 37—61.

92. Molero, Magie, 179.

93. Benito Jeronimo Feijoo, Cartas eruditas y curiosa (Madrid [1750] 1774), 3rd vol., Letter
2, pp. 10-13. I have used the electronic edition available at http://www.filosofia.org/
bjf/bjfooo.htm

94. Aurelio de Llano Roza de Ampudia, Del Folklore Asturiano (Oviedo, [1922] 1977),
144-50.

Notes | 317

95. See Peter Missler, 'Tradicion y parodia en el Millonario de San Ciprian, primer
recetario impreso para buscar tesoros en Galicia (Las hondas raices del Ciprianillo: i a
Parte)', Culturas Populares. Revista Electronica 2 (Mayo-Agosto 2006).

96. Feijoo, Cartas eruditas y curiosa, 15-16.

97. Roza de Ampudia, Del Folklore Asturiano, 150-1.

98. See 'Sao Cipriano in Northern Portugal', http://www.caaenglish.com/cipriano_01.
htm

99. See, for example, Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot,
[1978! 1988), ch. 1, pp. 281-6.

100. See Stephan Bachter, 'Grimoires and the Transmission of Magical Knowledge', in
Owen Davies and Willem de Blecourt (eds), Beyond the Witch Trials: Witchcraft and
Magic in Enlightenment Europe (Manchester, 2004), 194—206; idem, 'Anleitung zum
Aberglauben: Zauberbiicher und die Verbreitung Magischen "Wissens" seit dem 18.
Jahrhundert' , PhD Thesis, Hamburg University (2005); idem, 'Wie man Hollenfur-
sten handsam macht. Zauberbiicher und die Tradierung magischen Wissens', in
Geschichte(n) der Wirklichkeit (Augsburg, 2002), 371-90; My thanks to Stephan for
providing copies of some of his published work.

101. Alan Corkhill, 'Charlatanism in Goethe's Faust and Tieck's William Lovell', Forum
for Modern Language Studies 42:1 (2005), 81-2.

102. Johann Christoph Adelung, Geschichte der Menschichen Narrheit (Leipzig, 1789),
vii.365-404.

103. John A. Walz, 'An English Faustsplitter', Modern Language Notes 42:6 (1927), 353.

104. A. Kuhn and W. Schwarz, Norddeutsche Sagen, Mdrchen und Gebrduche (Leipzig, 1848),
90; translation by D. L. Ashliman, 'Legends from Germany', http://www:pitt.edu/
-dash/ magicbook.html

105. Frederic Adolphus Ebert, A General Bibliographical Dictionary, from the German
(Oxford, 1837), iv.1533.

106. Wolfgang Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic, Religious Zeal-
otry, and Reason of State in Early Modern Europe, trans. J. C. Grayson and David Lederer
(Cambridge, 1997), 339—40; David Lederer, 'Living with the Dead: Ghosts in Early
Modern Bavaria', in Edwards (ed.), Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits, 48-51.

107. Johannes Dillinger and Petra Feld, 'Treasure-Hunting: A Magical Motif in Law,
Folklore, and Mentality, Wiirttemberg, 1606— 1770', German History 20:2 (2002), 170.

108. Ibid. 167, 175. See also Edward Bever, The Realities of Witchcraft and Popular Magic in
Early Modern Europe: Culture, Cognition and Everyday Life (Basingstoke, 2008), chs. 5
and 6.

109. Butler, Ritual Magic, 190. On Butler's views see her entry in the DNB.

no. Manfred Tschaikner, Schatzgrdberei in Vorarlberg und Liechtenstein (Bludenz, 2006),
56—7, 59—62. My thanks to Manfred Tschaikner for providing me with a copy of
his book and Willem de Blecourt for contacting him on my behalf.

in. Ibid. 122.

318 | Notes

112. Margarethe Ruff, Zauberpraktiken als Lebenschilje: Magie im Alltag vom Mittelalter bis
heute (Frankfurt, 2003), 254—5; Tschaikner, Schatzgrdberei, 59, 62; Anton Quitzmann,
Die Herdnische Religion der Baiwaren (Leipzig and Heidelberg, i860), 124.

113. Bachter, 'Grimoires and the Transmission of Magical Knowledge', 194—5.

114. On the publishing history and content of these two titles see Adolf Spamer, Roma-
nusbiichlein. Historisch-philologischer Kommentar zu einem deutschen Zauberbuch (Berlin,
1958); Will-Erich Peuckert, 'Die Egyptischen Geheimnisse', ARV 10 (1954), 40-96.
Joseph H. Peterson has generously made available English translations of the Roma-
nusbiichlein and the Egyptische Geheimnisse; (http://www.esotericarchives.com/
moses/ romanus.htm) .

115. Nils Freytag, Aberglauben im ig. Jahrundert (Berlin, 2003), 151.

116. Franz Peter, Die Literatur der Faustsage (Leipzig, 1851), 17, 18.

117. Freytag, Aberglauben, 145.

118. Ibid. 144.

119. See Bachter, 'Anleitung zum Aberglauben', 128—31.

120. The most extensive English account of the grimoires in Das Klosteris in Butler, Ritual
Magic, 154-225.

121. See Bachter, 'Anleitung zum Aberglauben', 95—6. For those who have claimed 1797
as a publication date, see Hans Sebald, 'The 6th and 7th Books of Moses: The
Historical and Sociological Vagaries of a Grimoire', Ethnologia Europ&a 18:1 (1988),
53-8; Karl-Peter Wanderer, Gedrukter Aberglaube (Frankfurt, 1976), 51.

122. Salmonsens konversationsleksikon (Copenhagen, 1915—30), v.379; Birgitte Rorbye,
Kloge Folk og Skidtfolk (Copenhagen, 1976), 260.

123. Velle Espeland, Svartbok (Oslo, 1974), 23; Carl-Martin Edsman, Fran silverfisken i
Skaga till trdguden I Silbojokk (Uppsala, 1996), 348-52.

124. Gustav Henningsen, 'Witch Persecution after the Era of the Witch Trials: A Con-
tribution to Danish Ethnohistory', ARV 44 (1988), 134-5.

125. Arne Bugge Amundsen, Svarteboken jra Borge (Sarpsborg, 1987), 10.

126. Ferdinand Ohrt, Danmarks Trylleformler (Copenhagen, 1917), i.513.

127. Torbjon Aim, 'Sevenbom Juniperus Sabina i folketradisj onen i Norge', Blyttia:
Norges Botaniske Annales 61:4 (2003), 187.

128. See, for example, those extracted from black books in Anton Christian Bang, Norske
Hexe-Formularer og Magiske Opskrifte (Kristiania, [1901-2] 2005), 703-1. On treasure
hunting see, for example, John Lindow, 'Swedish Legends of Buried Treasure',
Journal of American Folklore 95:377 (1982), 257-79.

129. Mary S. Rustad, The Black Books of Elverum (Lakeville, [1999] 2006), 5. See also
Ronald Grambo, Djevelens Eivshistorie (Oslo, 1990), 150-1.

130. Tyge Krogh, Oplysningstiden og det magiske (Copenhagen, 2000), 124—50; Soili-Maria
Olli, Visioner av vdrlden (Umea, 2007); Soili-Maria Olli, 'The Devil's Pact: A Male
Strategy', in Davies and de Blecourt, Beyond the Witch Trials, 100-17; P er Sorbin,

Notes | 319

'Wicked Arts' : Witchcraft and Magic Trials in Southern Sweden, 1635-1754 (Leiden, 1999),
33—5-

131. Bang, Norske Hexe-Formulare, pp. xxxviii-xxxix; Kathleen Stokker, Remedies and
Rituals: Folk Medicine in Norway and the New Land (Minnesota, 2007), 100.

132. Bachter, 'Anleitung zum Aberglauben', 39; Scheible, Das Kloster, vol. ii.

133. Amundsen, Svarteboken, 17-19.

134. Bang, Norske Hexe-Formularer, p. xix.

135. Ravaisson, Archives, v.361; vi.185— 6, 208.

136. Pacta und Geliibdniis dess zu Pignerole gesangen sitzenden Hertzogs von Luxenburg so er mit
dent peydigen Satan getroffen (c. 1680). Luxembourg was not in the Bastille in 1659.

137. A Letter from a Trooper in Flanders, to his Comerade: Shewing, That Luxemburg is a Witch,
and deals with the Devil (London, 1695), 13. See also The Bargain which the Duke of
Luxembourg, General of the Troops of France, made with the Devil, to win battles (London,
1692).

138. Den beromte Hertug of Luxemborgs, forrige kongel. Fransk General samt Hofmarskal, hans
Pagt ofForbund med Satan (Copenhagen, 1787).

139. Olli, 'The Devil's Pact', 102; Bang, Norske Hexe-Formularer, 710, 712.

140. Lisa Rana, 'Skolekerer Arne Larsen's Svartebok', http://www.aaks.no/FullStory.
aspx?m=34&amid=26i9; Rustad, Black Books ofElverum, p. xxxvii.

141. Ohrt, Danmarks Trylleformler, i.99.

142. See Kathleen Stokker, 'Between Sin and Salvation: The Human Condition in
Legends of the Black Book Minister', Scandinavian Studies 67 (1995), 91—108, esp.
103; Espeland, Svartbok, 10, 13; Reimund Kvideland and Henning K. Sehmsdorf
(eds), Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend (Minneapolis, 1988), 286-7.

143. Espeland, Svartbok, 7-8; Rustad, Black Books ofElverum, p. xxxvii.

144. Kvideland and Sehmsdorf (eds) , Scandinavian Folk Belief 282; Krogh, Oplysningstiden,
130.

145. Stokker, Remedies, 70, 82—3.

146. See, for example, Ohrt, Danmarks Trylleformler, 1.105— 7; H. P. Hansen, Kloge Folk
(Copenhagen, 1961), ii.74-1 14.

147. For a study of Kokborg and a reprint of his Syprianus see H. P. Hansen, Kloge Folk
(Copenhagen, i960), i.20— 78.

148. Henrik Kokborg, Mod Forhexelse (n.d.); idem, Tre trylleformularerder (n.d.).

149. Henningsen, 'Witch persecution', 145.

150. Laura Stark, The Magical Self: Body, Society and the Supernatural in Early Modem Rural
Finland (Helsinki, 2006), 179-80, 248-9.

151. Ulo Valk, The Black Gentleman: Manifestations of the Devil in Estonian Folk Religion
(Helsinki, 2001), 86-92.

320 I Notes

152. See Owen Davies, Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History (London, 2003), chs
5 and 6.

153. See Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture 1736-1951 (Manchester, 1999), ch. 3.

154. See, for example, John Denis, Denis's Catalogue of Ancient and Modern Books, For 1787
(London, 1787), 179; Nicolas Prevost, Duo Catalogi Librorum (London, 1730), 48.

155. Ebenezer Sibly, A New and Complete Illustration of the Celestial Science of Astrology, 4
vols (London, 1790), ii. 1093-5.

156. Davies, Cunning-Folk, 135,

157. E. P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast (New York, 1993), p. xiv. On occult
London at the time see also Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 236—50; Owen
Davies, 'Angels in Elite and Popular Magic, 1650— 1790', in Peter Marshall and
Alexandra Walsham (eds), Angels in the Early Modern World (Cambridge, 2006),
316—18; A. G. Debus, 'Scientific Truth and Occult Tradition: The Medical World
of Ebenezer Sibly (1751-1799)', Medical History 26 (1982), 259-78; D. S. Katz, 'The
Occult Bible: Hebraic Millenarianism in Eighteenth-Century England', International
Archives of the History of Ideas 175 (2001), 119—32; J. F. C. Harrison, The Second
Coming: Popular Millenarianism 1780-1850 (London, 1979); Patrick Curry, Prophecy and
Power: Astrology in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1989), 134-7.

158. NewDNB.

159. See Davies, Cunning-Folk, 51-2; Francis X. King, The Flying Sorcerer (Oxford, 1992),
39-51-

160. For the sketchy details of Barrett's life see King, Flying Sorcerer.

161. Morning Chronicle, 13 August 1802.

162. Ibid. 16 August 1802; Caledonian Mercury, 14 October 1802; Morning Chronicle, 19
October 1802.

163. See Alison Butler, 'Beyond Attribution: The Importance of Barrett's Magus', fournal
for the Academic Study of Magic 1 (2003), 7-33.

164. Francis Barrett, The Magus (York Beach, [1801] 2000), p. vi.

165. The Critical Review, 34 (1802), 406, 407.

166. Liverpool Mercury, 22 June 1857. See also Davies, Cunning-Folk, 142—3.

167. Ibid. 115— 18.

168. The Gentleman's Magazine, 100 (1830), 96.

169. James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes, 'Reassessing the Reputation of Thomas Tegg,
London Publisher, 1776-1846', Book History 3 (2000), 45-60.

170. See Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in
London, 1795-1840 (Oxford, [1988] 2002), ch. 10.

171. Patrick Curry, A Confusion of Prophets: Victorian and Edwardian Astrology (London,
1992), 50.

172. Robert Cross Smith, The Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1825), 230.

Notes | 321

173. Curry, Confusion, 51.

174. See, for example, Mark Harrison, 'From Medical Astrology to Medical Astronomy:
Sol-Lunar and Planetary Theories of Disease in British Medicine, c.1700— 1850",
British Journal for the History of Science 33:1 (2000), 25-48.

IV Across the Oceans

1. On the continued belief in witchcraft and the activities of cunning-folk during the
eighteenth century see Herbert Leventhal, In the Shadow of the Enlightenment (New
York, 1976); John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan (Oxford, 1982), 387—94; Peter
Benes, 'Fortunetellers, Wise-Men, and Magical Healers in New England, 1644-
1850', in idem (ed.), Wonders of the Invisible World: 1600-1800 (Boston, 1995), 127-42;
Erik R. Seeman, Pious Persuasions: Laity and Clergy in Eighteenth Century New England
(Baltimore, 1999), ch. 4; Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the
American People (Cambridge, MA, 1990), ch. 3.

2. William H. Loyd Jr, 'The Courts of Pennsylvania Prior to 1701', American Law
Register 55:9 (1907), 564.

3. Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith, 77.

4. Bibliotheca Burnetiana: Being a Catalogue of the Intire Library of his Excellency William
Burnet Esq; Deceased (London, c.1730), 33.

5. See Julius Friedrich Sachse, The German Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania 1694—1708
(Philadelphia, 1895); Donald F. Durnbaugh, 'Work and Hope: The Spirituality of
the Radical Pietist Communitarians', Church History 39: 1 (1970), 72—90; Elizabeth W.
Fischer, ' "Prophecies and Revelations": German Cabbalists in Early Pennsylvania',
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 109 (July 1985), 299-333.

6. John Fanning Watson, Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1857),
ii.36; Horatio Gates Jones, The Levering Family (Philadelphia, 1858), 19.

7. Quoted in Leventhal, Shadow of the Enlightenment, 108; Alan W. Armstrong (ed.),
'Forget not Mee & My Garden . . .': Selected Letter 1725-1768 of Peter Collinson, E.R.S.
(Philadelphia, 2002), 5.

8. Arthur Versluis, The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance (New Y ork, 2000), 25—8.

9. Ibid.; Jeff Bach, Voices of the Turtledoves: The Sacred World of Ephrata (Philadelphia,
2003), esp. ch. 7.

10. A Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the Library Company of Philadelphia (Philadelphia,
1835), 188-92.

11. Catalogue of the New York Society Library (New York, 1813), 232.

12. Catalogue of the San Francisco Mercantile Library (San Francisco, 1854), 153.

1 3 . William D. Stahlman, 'Astrology in Colonial America: An Extended Query', William
and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 13:4 (1956), 551—63; Leventhal, Shadow of the Enlighten-
ment, 23-56; John F. Ross, 'The Character of Poor Richard: Its Source and Alteration',

322 | Notes

PMLA 55:3 (1940), 785-94; Henry Phillips, Jr, 'Certain Almanacs Published in
Philadelphia between 1705 and 1744', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
19:108 (1881), 291-7; Butler, Awash, 80-2.

14. John McBride, 'Benjamin Franklin as Viewed in France during the Bourbon Restor-
ation (1814-1830)', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 100:2 (1956), 126;
Gamle Richards Swartkonst-bok (Karlshamn, 1832).

15. See Victor Neuburg, 'Chapbooks in America: Reconstructing the Popular Reading of
Early America', in Cathy N. Davidson (ed.) Reading in America: Literature and Social History
(Baltimore, 1989), ch. 3; KevinJ. Hayes, Folklore and Book Culture (Knoxville, 1997), ch. 1.

16. Cited in Erik R. Seeman, Pious Persuasions: Laity and Clergy in Eighteenth-Century New
England (Baltimore, 1999), 127.

17. Harry B. Weiss, 'Oneirocritica Americana', Bulletin of the New York Public Library 48:6
(1944), 526—9. See also Eric Gardner, "The Complete Fortune Teller and Dream Book: An
Antebellum Text "By Chloe Russel, A Woman of Colour" ', New England Quarterly
78:2 (2005), 259-61.

18. The United States Literary Gazette 4 (1826), 416.

19. Weiss, 'Oneirocritica Americana', 531.

20. The History of the wicked life and horrid death of Doctor fohn Faustus (Norwich, CT, 1795);
The Surprising life and death of Dr. John Faustus, D.D (Worcester, MA, 1795); The
Wondeful and surprizing life, and horrid death, of Doctor John Faustus (Philadelphia, 1797).
See also Richard M. Dorson, Jonathan Draws the Long Bow (Cambridge, MA, 1946), 55.

21. See Don Yoder, The Pennsylvania German Broadside: A History and Guide (Philadelphia,
2005), ch. 8.

22. Thomas Francis Gordon, The History of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1829), 579.

23. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, ii.32.

24. Leventhal, Shadow of the Enlightenment, 37.

25. Sachse, German Pietists, 120-3.

26. See Alan Taylor, 'The Early Republic's Supernatural Economy: Treasure Seeking in
the American Northeast, 1780— 1830', American Quarterly 38:1 (1986), 6—34; Gerard T.
Hurley, 'Buried Treasure Tales in America', Western Folklore 10:3 (195 1), 197—216;
Leventhal, Shadow of the Enlightenment, 1 10—18; Dorson, Jonathan Draws the Long Bow,
I73-87-

27. I have used the online edition of The Writings of Benjamin Franklin: Philadelphia,
1726-1757, http://www.historycarper.com/resources/twobf2/bb8.htm; Watson, Annals
of Philadelphia, 271—2.

28. Andrew Barton, The Disappointment: or, The Force of Credulity, 2nd edn (Philadelphia,
1796).

29. Ibid. 10— 11.

30. Ibid. 66.

31. Ibid. 53.

Notes | 323

32. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, i. 268— 70. For further background on the authorship
and theatrical history of The Disappointment see Carolyn Rabson, 'Disappointment
Revisited: Unweaving the Tangled Web: Part 1', American Music 1:1 (1983), 12-35.

33. Hurley, 'Buried Treasure', 200—1.

34. Ibid. 203. Leventhal assumes that the Moses Book was a key work for the eighteenth-
century Pennsylvania Germans, but this is highly unlikely.

35. The literature on the origins of Mormonism is large and often partisan, and I have no
wish to provide a full bibliography. As well as those cited, I would also recommend
David Persuitte, Joseph Smith and the Origins of the Book of Mormon, 2nd edn (Jefferson,
2000); Richard Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginning of Mormonism (Urbana, 1984);
John L. Brooke, The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844
(Cambridge, 1994); Mark Ashurst-McGee, 'Moroni as Angel and as Treasure
Guardian', FARMS Review 18 (2006), 34-100.

36. D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 2nd edn (Salt Lake
City, 1998), esp. 194-201, 217-21.

37. On these charms and their derivation see ibid. ch. 4.

38. Ibid. 104.

39. Ibid. 73.

40. Ibid. 84.

41. Ibid. 274.

42. William J. Hamblin, 'That Old Black Magic', FARMS Review of Books 12:2 (2000), 2.

43. Ibid. 51.

44. Ibid. 33-4.

45. Bibliotheca Dramatica. Catalogue of the Theatrical and Miscellaneous Library of the Late
William E. Burton (New York, i860), 286. On Burton's life see David L. Rinear, Stage,
Page, Scandals, and Vandals: William E. Burton and Nineteenth- Century American Theatre
(Carbondale, IL, 2004).

46. Bibliotheca Dramatica, 286; A Catalogue of Valuable, New and Second-hand Books . . .
Willis and Sotheran (London, 1859), 19.

47. Hamblin, 'That Old Black Magic', 79. He is also wrong to say that the last edition was
in 165 1.

48. See, for example, David Ogilvy, A Catalogue of Several Libraries of Books (London,
1784), 7; John Poole, Poole's Catalogue, for 1JQ2 (Chester, 1792), 100; Thomas and John
Egerton, A Catalogue of Books (London, 1787), 92; George Wagstaff, Wagstaff's New
Catalogue of Rare Old Books (London, 1782), 7; William Collins, A Catalogue of Books
(London, 1791), 102; Compton, Bibliotheca elegans & curiosa (London, 1783), 49;
Lackington, Allen, & Co, Second Volume of Lackington's Catalogue (London, 1793),
231; Benjamin White, A Catalogue of the Library of Alexander Thistlethwayte (London,
1772), 79-

49. Poole, Poole's Catalogue, 101; Lackington, Second Volume of Lackington' s Catalogue, 231.

324 I Notes

50. Hamblin, 'That Old Black Magic', 79 n. 174.

51. Ibid. 79.

52. Owen Davies, Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History (London, 2003), 155—8.
For comparisons of different versions of the symbol of Nalgah see Quinn, Early
Mormonism, figs. 72-5.

53. W. J. Wintemberg, 'Items of German-Canadian Folk-Lore', Journal of American
Folklore 12:44 (!899)> 5°- See also J. Frederick Doering, 'Pennsylvania German Folk
Medicine in Waterloo County, Ontario', Journal of American Folklore 49:193 (1936),
194-8.

54. See Leslie Choquette, Frenchmen into Peasants: Modernity and Tradition in the Peopling of
French Canada (Cambridge, MA, 1997); Peter N. Moogk, 'Reluctant Exiles: Emigrants
from France in Canada before 1760', William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 46:3 (1989),
463—505; H. Harry Lewis, 'Population of Quebec Province: Its Distribution and
National Origins', Economic Geography 16:1 (1940), 59—68.

55. Lewis, 'Population of Quebec', 63.

56. Robert-Lionel Seguin, Ea sorcellerie au Quebec du XVIf au XIV" siecle (Ottawa and Paris,
1978), 83—8. On witchcraft in Quebec see also Jonathan L. Pearl, 'Witchcraft in New
France in the Seventeenth Century: The Social Aspect', Historical Reflections 4:2 (1977),
191-205.

57. C.-Marius Barbeau, 'Anecdotes Populaires du Canada. Premiere Serie', Journal of
American Folklore 33:129 (1920), 232.

58. Joseph-Norbert Duquet, Ee Veritable Petit-Albert ou secret pour acquerir un tresor (Quebec,
1861), 5.

59. For literary analyses of the book see Louis Lasnier, Ea Magie de Saint- Amand. Essai.
Imaginaire et Alchimie dans Ee Chercheur de tresors' de Philippe Aubert de Gaspe (Montreal,
1980); Bernard Andres, 'L'influence des livres: figures de savoir medical chez Pierre de
Sales Laterriere et Philippe Aubert de Gaspe fils', Voix et Images 19:3 (1994), 466-86.

60. Philippe Aubert de Gaspe, ETnfluence d'un livre, facsimile edition with introduction by
Andre Senecal (Quebec, [1837] 1984), 18.

61. Ibid. 179-80, 196.

62. Duquet, Ee Veritable Petit-Albert, 5, 57.

63. Ibid. 41.

64. de Gaspe, ETnfluence d'un livre, 24.

65. See Mark L. Louden, 'African- Americans and Minority Language Maintenance in
the United States', Journal of Negro History 85:4 (2000), 223-40. On the complexity
of French Louisiana ethnicity see Cecyle Trepanier, 'The Cajunization of
French Louisiana: Forging a Regional Identity', Geographical Journal 157:2 (1991),
161-71.

66. Robert Chaudenson, Creolization of Language and Culture (London, 2001), 258.
Original French edition published in 1992.

Notes | 325

67. Much has been written on the subject, but for general overviews in English see
George Eaton Simpson, Religious Cults of the Caribbean: Trinidad, Jamaica, and Haiti
(Rio Piedras, 1970); Margarite Fernandez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gelbert,
Creole Religions of the Caribbean (New York, 2003); Kean Gibson, Comfa Religion and
Creole Language in a Caribbean Community (New York, 2001); James T. Houk, Spirits,
Blood, and Drums: The Orisha Religion in Trinidad (Philadelphia, 1995).

68. See Alasdair Pettinger, 'From Vaudoux to Voodoo', Forum for Modern Language Studies
40:4 (2004), 415-25.

69. Laura de Mello e Souza, The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross: Witchcraft, Slavery,
and Popular Religion in Colonial Brazil, trans. Diane Grosklaus Whitty (Austin, 2003),
130-41.

70. See Nicole Edelman, Voyantes, guerisseuses et visionnaires en France 1785—^14 (Paris,
1995), 74-126.

71. Raquel Romberg, 'Whose Spirits Are They? The Political Economy of Syncretism
and Authenticity', Journal of Folklore Research 35:1 (1998), 71.

72. For English accounts of the rise of Spiritism in Brazil see, for example, Donald Warren
Jr, 'Spiritism in Brazil', Journal of Inter-American Studies 10:3 (1968), 393—405; David
Hess, Samba in the Night: Spiritism in Brazil (New York, 1994).

73. Benson Saler, 'Nagual, Witch, and Sorcerer in a Quiche Village', Ethnology 3:5 (1964),
319. This was perhaps a reference to the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses.

74. Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and
Healing (Chicago, 1987). 259.

75. Peter Wogan, 'Magical Literacy: Encountering a Witch's Book in Ecuador', Anthro-
pological Quarterly 71:4 (1998), 186-202.

76. Richard Price, 'Fishing Rites and Recipes in a Martiniquan Village', Caribbean Studies 1
(1961), 8.

77. Alfred Metraux, Levaudou hditien (Paris, [1958] 1968), 239; W. B. Seabrook, The Magic
Island (London, 1929), 308-15.

78. Philadelphia Press, 4 August 1885.

79. J. S. Udal, 'Obeah in the West Indies', Folklore 26:3 (191 5), 294.

80. Anon., 'Concerning Negro Sorcery in the United States', Journal of American Folklore
3:11 (1890), 283 n. 2.

81. Ary Ebro'in, Quimbois, magie noire et'i sorcellerie aux Antilles (Paris, 1977), 113— 14.

82. Price, 'Fishing Rites', 5, 8; Ebroin, Quimbois, 155.

83. Udal, 'Obeah in the West Indies', 282-3.

84. U. G. Weatherly, 'The West Indies as a Sociological Laboratory', American Journal of
Sociology 29:3 (1923), 296, 298.

85. Frank Wesley Pitman, 'Fetishism, Witchcraft, and Christianity among the Slaves',
Journal of Negro History 11:4 (1926), 651.

86. Pettinger, 'From Vaudoux to Voodoo', 417.

326 | Notes

87. Pitman, 'Fetishism, Witchcraft', 652.

88. See the New DNB.

89. William W. Newell, 'Myths of Voodoo Worship and Child Sacrifice in Hayti',
Journal of American Folklore 1:1 (1888), 16-30; idem, 'Reports of Voodoo Worship in
Hayti and Louisiana', Journal of American Folklore 2:4 (1889), 41-7.

90. During the US occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934 tales of Voodoo and
zombies once again became popular news fodder, helping justify the need for the
American presence. See Joan Dayan, 'Vodoun, or the Voice of the Gods', in
Margarite Fernandez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (eds), Sacred Possessions
(New Brunswick, 1997), 14.

91. Spenser St John, Hayti, or the Black Republic (London, 1884), 201-2.

92. This account is based on details in The Gleaner, 29 October 1904; The Gleaner, 12
November 1904; Udal, 'Obeah in the West Indies', 286-93 ■ The latter was based on
the trial report in the newspaper The Voice of St. Lucia.

93. Jay D. Dobbin, The Jomhee Fiance of Montserrat (Columbus, 1986), 23.

94. The Times, 7 August 1884; Church Times, 21 December 1928; Montague Summers,
Witchcraft and Black Magic (London, [1946] 1964), 262.

95. Chaudenson, Creolization of Language and Culture, 250, 258.

96. See, for example, Gerard Mouls, Etudes sur la sorcellerie a la Reunion (St-Denis, 1982),
12, 25, 46.

97. Jean Benoist, Anthropologie medicale en societe Creole (Paris, 1993), 60, 141-2. See also
Jean Benoist, Les carnets d'un guerisseur reunionais (St Denis, 1980), 18.

98. See George M. Foster, 'On the Origin of Humoral Medicine in Latin America',
Medical Anthropology Quarterly^ 1:4 (1987), 355-93.

99. See, for example, C. H. Browner, 'Criteria for Selecting Herbal Remedies', Ethnol-
ogy 24:1 (1985), 13-22; Arvilla Payne-Jackson and Mervyn c. Alleyne, Jamaican Folk
Medicine (Kingston, 2004), ch. 2.

100. Foster, 'On the Origin of Humoral Medicine', 365—6.

101. Andre-Marcel d'Ans, Haiti: paysage et societe (Paris, 1987), 274; Chaudenson, Creol-
ization of Language and Culture, 258.

102. Douglas Taylor, 'Carib Folk-Beliefs and Customs from Dominica, B.W.I.', South-
western Journal of Anthropology 1:4 (1945), 510— 11.

103. Jane C. Beck, To Windward of the Land: The Occult World of Alexander Charles
(Bloomington/London, 1979), 206. See also Payne-Jackson and Alleyne, Jamaican
Folk Medicine, 116.

104. Dobbin, The Jomhee Dance, 29.

105. Christiane Bougerol, Une ethnographic des conflits aux Antilles (Paris, 1997), 155.

106. Reginald Campbell Thompson, Semitic Magic: Its Origins and Development (London,
1908), p. xxxvi.

Notes | 327

07. Garnik Asatrian and Victoria Arakelova, 'A Manual of Iranian Folk Magic in the
Archive of the Caucasian Centre for Iranian Studies in Yerevan', Iran and the Caucasus
3 (1999-2000), 239-42.

08. Gerda Sengers, Women and Demons: Cult Healing in Islamic Egypt (Leiden, 2003),
39, 43-

09. Jack Goody, 'Restricted Literacy in Northern Ghana', in idem (ed.), Literacy in
Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1968), 235 n. 1; Moshe Sharon, 'New Religions
and Religious Movements — The Common Heritage', in idem (ed.), Studies in Modern
Religions and Religious Movements and the Bdbl-Bahd'l Faiths (Leiden, 2004), 24—5;
A. Fodor, 'The Role of Fir' awn in Popular Islam', Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 61
(1975), 238—40; Constant Hames, 'Taktub ou la magie de l'ecriture islamique: Textes
soninke a usage magique', Arabica 34:3 (1987), 320—2; Nicole B. Hansen, 'Ancient
Execration Magic in Coptic and Islamic Egypt', in Paul Mirecki and Marvin Meyer
(eds), Magic and Ritual in the Ancient World (Leiden, 2002), 427-47; Benjamin J.
Kilborne, 'Moroccan Dream Interpretation and Culturally Constituted Defense
Mechanisms', Ethos 9:4 (1981), 297.

10. See Caroline H. Bledsoe and Kenneth M. Robey, 'Arabic Literacy and Secrecy
among the Mende of Sierre Leone', Man, ns 21:2 (1986), 202-26.

11. Goody, 'Restricted Literacy in Northern Ghana', 198—241.

12. For examples of Islamic written talismans found in the Caribbean and Latin America
see Yvonne P. Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring
Tradition (Berkeley, 2003), 34, 46; Carmen Cerezo Ponte, 'Hallazgo de unos amu-
letos musulmanes en el interior de dos piezas de la cultura Atacamefia', Anales del
Museo de America 13 (2005), 339-58.

V Rediscovering Ancient Magic

1. Karl H. Dannenfeldt, 'Egyptian Mumia: The Sixteenth Century Experience and
Debates', Sixteenth Century Journal 16:2 (1985), 163—80.

2. Brian A. Curran, 'The Renaissance Afterlife of Ancient Egypt (1400— 1650)', in Peter
Ucko and T. C. Champion (eds), The Wisdom of Egypt: Changing Visions through the
Ages (London, 2003), 119.

3. Zur Shalev, 'Measurer of All Things: John Greaves (1602— 1652), the Great Pyramid,
and Early Modern Metrology', Journal of the History of Ideas 63:4 (2002) 559; Peter N.
Miller, 'Peiresc, the Levant and the Mediterranean', in Alastair Hamilton, Maurits H.
van den Boogert, and Bart Westerweel (eds), The Republic of Letters and the Levant
(Leiden, 2005), 117.

4. See Erik Iversen, The Myth of Egypt and its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition (1961);
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, 'Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on
Western Society and Thought: A Preliminary Report', Journal of Modern History
40:1 (1968), 10.

I Notes

5. See Thomas C. Singer, 'Hieroglyphs, Real Characters, and the Idea of Natural
Language in English Seventeenth-Century Thought', Journal of the History of Ideas
50:1 (1989), 49-7°-

6. Erik Hornung, The Secret Lore of Egypt: Its Impact on the West (Ithaca, 2001), ch. 14.

7. Iain McCalman, Last Alchemist: Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in the Age of Reason
(New York, 2003), 41-2, 52; Henry R. Evans, Cagliostro and his Egyptian Rite of
Freemasonry (Washington, 19 19), 8.

8. Florian Ebeling, The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus: Hermeticism from Ancient to
Modern Times, trans. David Lorton (Ithaca, 2007), 121-4.

9. Cited in Fekri Hassan, 'Imperialist Appropriations of Egyptian Obelisks', in David
Jeffries (ed.), Views of Ancient Egypt since Napoleon Bonaparte (London, 2003), 64. See
also Jennifer Hallett, 'Paganism in England 1 885-1914', PhD thesis, University of
Bristol (2006), 49-57.

0. See, for example, Dominic Montserrat, Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt
(London, 2000), ch. 6; Sally MacDonald and Michael Rice (eds), Consuming Ancient
Egypt (London, 2003); Susan D. Cowie and Tom Johnson, The Mummy in Fact, Fiction
and Film (London, 2002).

1 . See, for example, Charles Godfrey Leland, Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling (London,
1891).

2. Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture 1736-1951 (Manchester, 1999), 138—9;
Maureen Perkins, The Reform of Time: Magic and Modernity (London, 2001), 67—9.

3. Charles. W. Roback, The Mysteries of Astrology, and the Wonders of Magic (Boston,
1854), pp. xi-xii.

4. Henry Carrington Bolton, 'Fortune-Telling in America To-Day. A Study of Advert-
isements', Journal of American Folklore 8:31 (1895), 305—6.

5. John Ball, 'Remarks on "Lost" Oases of the Libyan Desert', Geographical Journal 72:3
(1928), 250-8; E. A.Johnson Pasha, 'Zerzura', Geographical Journal 75:1 (1930), 59-61;
G. A. Wainwright, 'The Search for Hidden Treasure in Egypt', Man 31 (193 1), 197;
Livres des Perles Enfouies (Cairo, 1907), 38; cited in L. V. Grinsell, 'The Folklore of
Ancient Egyptian Monuments', Folklore 58:4 (1947), 34. See also Okasha El-Daly,
Egyptology: The Missing Millenium: Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic Writings (London,
2005), 32-42.

6. See William Brashear, 'Magical Papyri: Magic in Bookform', in Peter Ganze (ed.), Das
Buch als magisches und als Reprdsentationsobjekt (Wiesbaden, 1992), 25—58; Hans Dieter
Betz, 'Introduction to the Greek Magical Papyri', in idem (ed.), The Greek Magical
Papyri in Translation: Including the Demotic Spells, vol. i: Texts, 2nd edn (Chicago, 1992),
pp. xli-liii.

7. Stephen L. Dyson, In Pursuit of Ancient Pasts (New Haven, 2006), 50.

8. On Egyptian— German scholarly relations see Hans Robert Roemer, 'Relations in the
Humanities between Germany and Egypt', in Agypten, Dauer und Wandel (Mainz am
Rhein, 1985), 1.

Notes | 329

19. Cited in Brashear, 'Magical Papyri', 54; Betz, 'Introduction', p. xliii.

20. The Classical Review, 8:1/2 (1894), 47.

21. Eustace Haydon, 'Twenty-Five Years of History of Religions', Journal of Religion 6:1
(1926), 17.

22. Charles S. Finch, 'The Works of Gerald Massey: Kamite Origins', in Ivan Van Sertima
(ed.), Egypt Revisited (New Brunswick, 1989), 401-13. See also the New DNB.

23. See Scott Trafton, Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania
(Durham, 2004), 33-5.

24. For a good account of the place of Theosophy in the wider occult world of the period
see Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England,
1850-1914 (Cambridge, 1985), ch. 5.

25. I have relied primarily on Robert L. Uzzel, Eliphas Levi and the Kabbalah: The Masonic
and French Connection of the American Mystery Tradition (Lafayette, 2006); Paul Chacor-
nac, Eliphas Levi (1810—1875) (Paris, [1926] 1989). See also Christopher Mcintosh,
Eliphas Levi and the French Occult Revival (London, 1972).

26. Eliphas Levi, Magic: A History of its Rites, Rituals and Mysteries (Mineola, [i860] 2006),
369-

27. Eliphas Levi, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual (Kila, 1998), 242. First
published in French as Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (Paris, 1856).

28. Chacornac, Eliphas Levi, 202 n.2.

29. Levi, Transcendental Magic, 242, 341, 291; Levi, Magic: A History, 205.

30. Levi, Magic: A History, 228.

31. Francis King, Modern Ritual Magic: The Rise of Western Occultism (Bridport, [1970]
1989), 35-7-

32. Eliphas Levi, Mysteries of Magic: A digest of the writings of Eliphas Levi, ed. A. E. Waite
(London, 1897), 218.

33. Levi, Magic: A History, 119.

34. Jean Du Potet, La magie devoilee ou principes des sciences occultes (Paris, [1852] 1977),
67-84; Roger Gougenot, des Mousseaux, Moeurs et pratiques des demons (Paris, 1854),
21 1— 12.

35. Eliphas Levi, La clef des grands mysteres (Paris, 1861), 166—7.

36. See Chacornac, Eliphas Levi, 143—60, 194—200.

37. See R. A. Gilbert, ' "The Supposed Rosy Crucian Society": Bulwer-Lytton and the
S.R.I.A.', in Richard Caron (ed.), Esoterisme, gnoses & imaginaire symbolique (Leuven,
2001), 389-403.

38. John Hamill, The Rosicrucian Seer: Magical Writings of Frederick Hockley (Wellingbor-
ough, 1986).

39. John Patrick Deveney, Paschal Beverly Randolph: A Nineteenth-Century Black American
Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician (New York, 1997).

330 | Notes

40. Ibid. 33.

41. Hamill, The Rosicrucian Seer; Logie Barrow, Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English
Plebeians 1830-igio (London, 1986), ch. 3; Deveney, Paschal Beverly Randolph, 33—4,
51-6; Patrick Curry, A Confusion of Prophets: Victorian and Edwardian Astrology
(London, 1992), ch. 3.

42. Deveney, Paschal Beverly Randolph, 69.

43. Cited ibid. 87.

44. See Joscelyn Godwin, Christian Chanel, and John P. Deveney, The Hermetic Brother-
hood of Luxor (York Beach, 1995).

45. Ibid. 376, 46.

46. Ellic Howe (ed), The Alchemist of the Golden Dawn: The Letters of the Revd W. A. Ayton
to F. L. Gardner and Others, iS86-igo3 (Wellingborough, 1985); New DNB.

47. See R. A. Gilbert's account of Mathers in the New DNB; King, Modern Ritual Magic,
passim; Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a
Magical Order (London, 1972).

48. Samuel Liddle MacGregor Mathers, The Book of the Sacred magic of Ahra-Melin the Mage
(London, 1898), p. xvi.

49. On the dangers of employing the Sacred Magic of Ahra-Melin see Mcintosh, Devil's
Bookshelf pp. 117-22.

50. I have relied on Waite's autobiography, Shadows of Life and Thought (London, 1938);
R. A. Gilbert, A. E. Waite: A Bibliography (Wellingborough, 1983); R. A. Gilbert,
A.E. Waite: Magician of Many Parts (Wellingborough, 1987).

51. The American Anthropologist 11:2 (1898), 52.

52. Andrew Cunningham, 'Paracelsus Fat and Thin: Thoughts on Reputations and
Realities', in Ole Peter Grell (ed.), Paracelsus: The Man and his Reputation, His Ideas
and Their Transformations (Leiden, 1998), 64—8.

53. Waite, Shadows, 137.

54. On his Tarot pack see Juliette Wood, 'The Celtic Tarot and the Secret Tradition: A
Study in Modern Legend Making', Folklore 109 (1998), 15-24.

55. A. E. Waite, The Book of Ceremonial Magic (London, 1910), pp. xii, xi. This was a
revised version of the Book of Black Magic and of Pacts.

56. Ibid, ix, 92-5. For further speculative discussion on the date of the Abra-Melin text see
Bernd Roling, 'The Complete Nature of Christ: Sources and Structures of a Chris-
tological Theurgy in the Works of Johannes Reuchlin', in Jan N. Bremmer and Jan R.
Veenstra (eds), The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period
(Leuven, 2002), 245-6.

57. See Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern
(Chicago, 2004), ch. 2; Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn; King, Modem Ritual
Magic; Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft

Notes | 331

(Oxford, 1999), 74-81; Alison Butler, 'The Intellectual Origins of Victorian Ritual
Magic', PhD thesis, University of Bristol (2003).

58. See Howe, Magicians of the Golden Dawn, 1—25.

59. See Butler, 'The Intellectual Origins of Victorian Ritual Magic', esp. ch. 3; Hallett,
'Paganism in England 1885-1914', 184-99.

60. King, Modern Ritual Magic, 83.

61. Owen, Place of Enchantment, 129—30; Butler, 'The Intellectual Origins of Victorian
Ritual Magic', 97.

62. This biography is based on that in the New DNB.

63. John Michael Greer, The New Encyclopedia of the Occult (St Paul, 2003), 116. Much has
been written on Crowley. Most recently see, for example, Lawrence Sutin, Do What
Thou Wilt: A Eife of Aleister Crowley (New York, 2002); Dave Evans, Aleister Crowley
and the 20th Century Synthesis ofMagick (Harpenden, 2007).

64. On the Lemegeton see Joseph H. Peterson, The Eesser Key of Solomon: Eemegeton
Clavicula Salomonis (York Beach, 2001).

65. Melville J. Herskovits and Frances S. Herskovits, Trinidad Village (New York, 1947),
225, 229; Kean Gibson, Comfa Religion and Creole Language in a Caribbean Community
(New York, 2001), 60; Ralph M. Lewis, Behold the Sign (San Jose [1944] 1957), 46.

66. The only published biography of Houssay is by the Martinist Robert Ambelain, L'abbe
Julio (Monseigneur Julien-Emest Houssay) (1844— 1912) (Paris, 1962). An authoritative
article on Houssay's place in the obscure, mystical Catholic and occult movements
of the period, '1890 + Ecclesia Gnostica + ', can be found at http://www.rretac.
com/docs/ 1 890%2oECCLESIA%2oGNOSTICA%2oAPOSTOLICA%20 1. pdf See
also http://www.gnostique.net/ecclesia/EG_II.htm.

67. Ambelain, E'abbe Julio, 22.

68. The most detailed history of Papus is Marie-Sophie Andre and Christophe Beaufils,
Papus biographic: la Belle Epoque de I'occultisme (Paris, 1995).

69. Ibid. 29.

70. Ibid. 38.

71. See also ibid. 124-8.

72. For their use in France see Marcelle Bouteiller, Medecine populaire d'hier et d'aujourd'hui
(Paris, 1966), 202; Judith Devlin, The Superstitious Mind: French Peasants and the
Supernatural in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, 1987), 239 n. 29. In the Caribbean
see Richard Price, 'Fishing Rites and Recipes in a Martiniquan Village', Caribbean
Studies 1 (1961), 8; Christiane Bougerol, Une ethnographie des conflits aux Antilles (Paris,
: 997), 144; Ary Ebroi'n, Quimbois, magie noire et sorcellerie aux Antilles (Paris, 1977), 156.
Since the mid-twentieth century, Abbe Julio has also been joined by another, albeit
fictitious, author of popular exorcisms and prayers named Dom Bernardin. A perusal
of occult works on offer in French Antilles' market stalls in the 1970s revealed that
Dom Bernardin had become a major influence with titles such as Ees grands exorcisms
and Ees prieres dorees; Ebroi'n, Quimbois, 156.

332 | Notes

73 . Laennec Hurbon, 'Les nouveaux mouvements religieux dans la Cara'ibe', in idem (ed.),
Le phenomene religieux dans la Cara'ibe (Paris, [1989] 2000), 322.

VI Grimoires USA

1. Henry Carrington Bolton, 'Fortune-Telling in America To-Day. A Study of Advert-
isements', Journal of American Folklore 8:31 (1895), 299.

2. Jeffrey E. Anderson, Conjure in African American Society (Baton Rouge, 2005), 120.

3 . Carolyn Morrow Long, A New Orleans Voudou Priestess: The Legend and Reality of Marie
Laveau (Gainesville, 2006), ch. 6; Anderson, Conjure in African American Society, 114;
Alasdair Pettinger, 'From Vaudoux to Voodoo', Forum for Modern Language Studies
40:4 (2004), 425 n. 32.

4. She has attracted considerable academic interest recently. See Ina Johanna Fandrich,
The Mysterious Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveaux: A Study of Powerful Female Leadership in
Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (London, 2005); Long, A New Orleans Voudou Priestess.

5. New Orleans Morning Tribune, 14 May 1927; cited in Carolyn Morrow Long, Spiritual
Merchants: Religion, Magic, and Commerce (Knoxville, 2001), 123, 145.

6. See the Oxford English Dictionary; A. Monroe Aurand, The Pow- Wow Book (Harrisburg,
1929), 20-1.

7. See Don Yoder, Discovering American Folklife: Essays on Folk Cultures and the Pennsyl-
vania Dutch (Mechanicsburg, [1990] 2001), 95—103; David W. Kriebel, 'Powwowing:
A Persistent Healing Tradition', Pennsylvanian German Review (Fall 2001), 14-22;
Barbara L. Reimensnyder, Powwowing in Union County: A Study of Pennsylvania German
Folk Medicine in Context (New York, [1982] 1989).

8. For genealogical details about Lenhart see http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/
cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=gkbopp&id==l942

9. Reimensnyder, Powwowing in Union County, 118.

10. Cited in Don Yoder, 'Hohman and Romanus: Origins and Diffusion of the Pennsyl-
vania German Powwow Manual', in Wayland D. Hand (ed.), American Folk Medicine
(Berkeley, 1976), 243.

1 1 . For the sketchy details of Hohman's career see Carleton F. Brown, 'The Long Hidden
Friend' , Journal of American Folklore, 17:65 (1904), 91-5; Yoder, 'Hohman and Roma-
nus', 236-7; idem, The Pennsylvania German Broadside (Philadelphia, 2005), 22—3.

12. Yoder, 'Hohman and Romanus', 236.

13. For a comprehensive list of editions see http://www.luckymojo.com/powwows.html

14. Brown, 'The Long Hidden Friend', 96.

15. John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend. A Collection of Mysterious and Invaluable
Arts and Remedies (Harrisburg, 1856), 3. All subsequent quotes are from this edition.

16. Ibid. 5.

17. Ibid. 4.

Notes | 333

18. Ibid. 10.

19. Ibid. 29.

20. Ibid. 11.

21. Aurand, Pour-Wow Book, 67.

22. Public Ledger, 14 May 1904; cited in Brown, 'The Long Hidden Friend', 90.

23. The Daily Courier, Connellsville, 22 October 195 1.

24. Public Ledger, 24 May 1904; cited in Brown, 'The Long Hidden Friend', 91.

25. Yoder, Discovering American Folklife, 99; reprinted from an article published in 1972.

26. Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South (reprint,
Madison, [i939l 1993), 294-5.

27. Loudell F. Snow, Walkin' over Medicine (Boulder, 1993), 64.

28. Details of his early life can be found in Mans Hultin, Doktor Roback eller en Svensk bonde
I Amerika (Stockholm, 1865); Pallebo Gbk eller den sig sjelf sd kallande Doktor Roback,
handelsman I Dbderhultswik (Westerwik, 1875); Ove Hagelin, 'En falsk svensk doctor i
Amerika', Biblis 1:2 (1998), 16-29; Barbro Lindgren, Fallebo gdken — den sjunde sonen av
en sjudne son (1998).

29. Charles. W. Roback, The Mysteries of Astrology, and the Wonders of Magic (Boston,
1854), p. viii.

30. Ibid. xiii.

31. The Meteorological Almanac and Spring Quarter Horoscope (Philadelphia, 1840); Hague's
Christian Almanac (Philadelphia, 1846); Hague's Horoscope and Scientific and Prophetic
Messenger (Philadelphia, 1845-8).

32. Hague's United States' Horoscope (Philadelphia, 1851), 3.

33. Thomas Hague, Exposition of C. W. Roback: Alias C. W. Hufeland, in Philadelphia, and
William Williams, alias Billy the Sweede, in Baltimore (Philadelphia, 1851), 9.

34. See also Thorsten Sellin, 'The Philadelphia Years of the Fallebo-G6k', Yearbook:
American Swedish Historical Foundation (1965), 12-22.

35. The Tioga Eagle, 17 July 1850.

36. New York Daily-Times, 1 May 1852.

37. New York Daily-Times, 31 July 1852.

38. New York Daily-Times, 11 September 1852.

39. New York Daily Times, 1 October 1853.

40. Francis E. Brewster, The Philosophy of Human Nature (1851), 392. See also Charles V.
Kraitsir, Glossology, Being a Treatise on the Nature of Language (New York, 1852), 52.

41. Charles Wyllys Elliott, Mysteries; Or Glimpses of the Supernatural (1852), 249.

42. Lambert A. Wilmer, Our Press Gang: Or, A Complete Exposition of the Corruption and
Crimes of the American Newspapers (Philadelphia and London, 1859), 160-1.

43. Anon., Humbug: A Look at Some Popular Impositions (New York, 1859), 65.

334 I Notes

44. Report of the Penal Code of Massachusetts (Boston, 1844), ch. 38. See also, Fulmer Mood,
'An Astrologer from Down East', New England Quarterly 5:4 (1932), 781.

45. Newspaper report reprinted in Hague, Exposition, 1.

46. Ibid. 5.

47. Laws of the General Assembly of the State of Pennsylvania, Passed at the Session of 1861
(Harrisburg, 1861), 270—1. A slightly revised version of the Act remains on the state's
statute books.

48. Roback, Mysteries, p. xiii.

49. L. D. Broughton, Elements of Astrology (New York, [1898] 1906), pp. xii-xiii.

50. Ibid. xiii. Fragments of Broughton's family history are scattered throughout Elements of
Astrology. The 1851 census shows Luke working in a chemist's shop in Leeds. For
some details regarding the astrological activities of one of his relatives in Leeds see
Owen Davies, Murder, Magic, Madness: The Victorian Trials of Dove and the Wizard
(London, 2005), 35, 39. On Broughton's American career see Mood, 'An Astrologer
from Down East', 777-99. For examples of early modern astrologers who provided
horoscopes see Herbert Leventhal, In the Shadow of the Enlightenment (New York,
1976), ch. 2.

51. D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 2nd edn (Salt Lake
City, 1998), 273.

52. Catalogue of W. Brotherhead, importer of old books, advertised in American Notes and
Queries 1 (1857). A year earlier a copy was on sale in London for 10s. 6d; The American
Catalogue of Books: Or, English Guide to American Literature (London, 1856), 56.

53. Donald R. Adam, 'Price and Wages in Antebellum America: The West Virginia
Experience' , Journal of Economic History 52:1 (1992), 210.

54. New York Daily-Times, 14 March 1855.

55. Lindgren, Fallebo goken, 45.

56. Hultin, Doktor Roback; Fallebo Gbk.

57. Roback, Mysteries, pp. xiii— xiv.

58. New York Daily-Times, 11 March 1854.

59. Fort Wayne Sentinel, 27 March 1858.

60. See Orm Overland, The Western Home: A Literary History of Norwegian America (North-
field, 1996), 57-8.

61 . Kathleen Stokker, 'Narratives of Magic and Healing: Oldtidens Sortebog in Norway and
the New Land', Scandinavian Studies 73 (2001), 411; eadem, Remedies and Rituals: Folk
Medicine in Norway and the New Land (Minnesota, 2007), 100.

62. See Stokker, 'Narratives' and eadem, Remedies, 96, 99-102.

63. Wilhelm Munthe, 'Svarteboka', in Francis Bull and W. P. Sommerfeldt (eds), Festskrift
til Hjalmar Pettersen (Oslo, 1926), 91; Stokker, 'Narratives', 413.

64. See Kevin J. Hayes, Folklore and Book Culture (Knoxville, 1997), 17.

Notes | 335

65. The Bee, Danville, 11 January 1929.

66. Brown, 'The Long Hidden Friend', 149 n. 119.

67. Oakland Tribune, 8 February 1906. On Herrera see Gregory S. Rodriguez, 'Aurelio
Herrera, Southern California's First "Mexican" Boxing Legend', http://www.
laprensa-sandiego.org/ archieve/novi2/ greg.htm

68. The Syracuse Herald, 15 July 1919. On the malign reputation of the Sixth and Seventh
Books of Moses in America see also, Hayes, Folklore and Book Culture, 22.

69. The Daily News, MD, 9 June 1916; New Oxford Item, 3 August 1916.

70. The most detailed examination of the case, on which this account is based, is J. Ross
McGinnis, Trials of Hex (Davis/Trinity Publishing Co., 2000).

71. On press coverage see McGinnis, Trials of Hex, 49—63.

72. The Olean Herald, 18 March 1929; Decatur Herald, 14 April 1929.

73. Ironwood Daily Globe, 20 March 1929.

74. Appleton Post-Crecent, 21 January 1932; Dunkirk Evening Observer, 21 January 1932;
Gettysburg Times, 24 March 1934. See also A. Monroe Aurand, The Realness of
Witchcraft in America (Lancaster, PA, 1942), 20—1.

75. Earl F. Robacker, 'Long-Lost Friend', New York Folklore Quarterly 12 (1956), 26;
Reimensnyder, Powwowing in Union County, 129; David Kriebel, 'Powwowing: A
Persistent American Esoteric Tradition', http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeIV/
Powwow.htm. Kriebel's PhD research will shortly be published as Powwowing among
the Pennsylvania Dutch.

76. David Hogan, 'Education and the Making of the Chicago Working Class, 1880-
1930', History of Education Quarterly 18:3 (1978), 232.

77. Mark H. Haller, 'Historical Roots of Police Behavior: Chicago, 1890— 1925', Law and
Society Review 10:2 (1976), 305.

78. Upton Sinclair, The Profits of Religion (New York [1918], 2000), 249.

79. See Catherine Anthony Ohnemus, 'Dr. Cyrus Teed and the Koreshan Unity Move-
ment', CRM 9 (2001), 10-12.

80. Oakland Tribune, I4january 1891.

81. Theda Skocpol and Jennifer Lynn Oser, 'Organization Despite Adversity: The
Origins and Development of African American Fraternal Associations', Social Science
History 28:3 (2004), 389-90.

82. Susan Nance, 'Mystery of the Moorish Science Temple: Southern Blacks and
American Alternative Spirituality in 1920s Chicago', Religion and American Culture
12:2 (2002) 140. See also Herbert Berg, 'Mythmaking in the African American
Muslim Context: The Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, and the
American Society of Muslims', Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73:3
(2005), 685-703.

83. Erdmann Doane Beynon, 'The Voodoo Cult among Negro Migrants in Detroit',
American Journal of Sociology 43:6 (1938), 894.

336 | Notes

84. Arthur Huff Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults of the Urban
North (Philadelphia, [1944] 2002), 43.

85. See Nance, 'Mystery of the Moorish Science Temple', 127—34; Abbie White,
'Christian Elements in Negro American Muslim Religious Beliefs', Phylon 25:4
(1964), 382—8; Ernest Allen Jr, 'Identity and Destiny: The Formative Views of the
Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam', in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and
John L. Esposito (eds), Muslims on the Americanization Path? (Oxford/New York,
1998), 179-80.

86. The Aquarian Gospel borrows from Nicholai Notovich's The Unknown Life of fesus
Christ (1894).

87. Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (Athens, GA,
[1940] 1986), 28.

88. Guy B. Johnson, 'Newspapers Advertisements and Negro Culture' , foumal of Social
Forces 3:4 (1925), 708—9; Yvonne P. Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African
American Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley, 2003), 141-2; Long, Spiritual Merchants, 141.

89. Sinclair, Profits, 264-5.

90. The Constitution, 23 June 1912; Oakland Tribune, 10 June 1923.

91. Fort Wayne Sentinel, 2 August 1912.

92. See Jacob S. Dorman, ' "I Saw You Disappear with My Own Eyes": Hidden
Transcripts of New York Black Israelite Bricolage', Nova Religio 11:1 (2007), 61-83.

93. Harry Middleton Hyatt, Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, Rootwork, 5 vols (Hannibal,
1970), i.755. For a useful discussion on the grimoires mentioned by Hyatt's inter-
viewees see Dan Harms, 'The Role of Grimoires in the Conjure Tradition', Journal
for the Academic Study of Magic, forthcoming.

94. The Complete Edition of the 6th and 7th Books of Moses: Or Moses' Magical Spirit-Art (n.p.
C.1930S), 146.

95. Hyatt, Hoodoo, iv. 3 186.

96. This account of DeLaurence's life is largely based on information provided during his
prosecution in 1919; US National Archives RG 28 — U.S. Post Office Records. Trial
of the Delaurence, Scott, and Company Mail Fraud Hearing. Location: 7E4-10/6/4. Box
29, Folder 77, pp. 1 12-18. See also Long, Spiritual Merchants, 190-1; W. F. Elkins,
'William Lauron DeLaurence and Jamaican Folk Religion', Folklore 97:2 (1986), 216.

97. Trial of the Delaurence, Scott, and Company Mail Fraud Hearing, 61, 72.

98. Long, Spiritual Merchants, 190.

99. The Evening Times (Cumberland, Maryland) 21 December 1906.

100. Trial of the Delaurence, Scott, and Company Mail Fraud Hearing, 91, 92.

101. Ibid. 8. The plagiarism of The Magus was noted in Francis King, Modern Ritual Magic:
The Rise of Western Occultism (Bridport, [1970] 1989), 195.

102. De Laurence's Catalog (Chicago, 1940), 212-14.

Notes | 337

103. He was possibly the inspiration for the Sun-worshipping prophet in G. K. Chester-
ton's Father Brown story 'The Eye of Apollo'.

104. The Syracuse Herald, 11 September 1908.

105. 'Reverend Doctor Otoman Zar'Adusht Hanish and His Mazdaznan Movement',
available at http:// tenets.zoroastrianism.com/ReverendDoctorOtomanZaradusht
HanishandhisMazdaznanMovement.pdf

106. Oakland Tribune, 17 March 1906.

107. See, for example, The Syracuse Herald, 11 September 1908; The Evening Post, 27
December 191 1.

108. See, for example, The Daily Review (Illinois), 6 March 1912; Oakland Tribune, 21
November 191 3.

109. The Syracuse Herald, 11 September 1908.

no. Chicago Daily Tribune, 12 and 13 November 1912.

in. The Syracuse Herald, 28 October 1912; Lima News, 20 October 1912.

112. Chicago Daily Tribune, 23 November 1912.

113. See, for example, The Mansfield News, 23 December 1923.

114. Trial of the Delaurence, Scott, and Company Mail Fraud Hearing, no.

115. Ibid. 112.

116. Ibid. 69, 102-3, l6 4 - 5> l6 9-

117. James A. Santucci, 'H. N. Stokes and the O.E. Library Critic', Theosophical History
1:6 (1986), 129-40.

118. Trial of the Delaurence, Scott, and Company Mail Fraud Hearing, 30.

119. Ibid. 43.

120. Ibid. 145.

121. Ibid. 145, 154-5, H4-

122. Frank K. Jensen, The Story of the Waite-Smith Tarot (Croydon Hills, 2006); ch. 4; R. A.
Gilbert, A. E. Waite: A Bibliography (Wellingborough, 1983).

123. Gilbert, A. E. Waite, 84.

124. Trial of the Delaurence, Scott, and Company Mail Fraud Hearing, 158, 162.

125. Ibid. 127, 140.

126. Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 November 193 1.

127. Robert Cameron Mitchell, 'Religious Protest and Social Change: The Origins of the
Aladura Movement in Western Nigeria', in R. L. Romberg and A. Mazrui (eds),
Protest and Power in Black Africa (Oxford, 1970), 478; Elizabeth Isichei, History of
Christianity in Africa (London, 1995), 295; J. D. Y. Peel, Aladura: A Religious Movement
among the Yoruba (Oxford, 1968), 128, 142, 170.

338 | Notes

128. Peter Probst and Brigitte Buhler, 'Patterns of Control on Medicine, Politics, and
Social Change among the Wimbum, Cameroon Grassfields', Anthropos 85 (1990),
453-

129. Henry John Drewal, 'Mermaids, Mirrors, and Snake Charmers: Igbo Mami Wata
Shrines', African Arts 21:2 (1988), 38-45.

130. Daniel Offiong, 'Social Relations and Witch Beliefs among the Ibibio', Africa 53:3
(1983), 75-

131. H. W. Turner, History of an African Independent Church, 2 vols (Oxford, 1967), ii.74;
Peter Probst, 'The Letter and the Spirit: Literacy and Religious Authority in the
History of the Aladura Movement in Western Nigeria', in Brian V. Street (ed.),
Cross-cultural Approaches to Literacy (Cambridge, 1993), 203-10; Robert Cameron
Mitchell, review of Turner's History of an African Independent Church, fournal for the
Scientific Study of Religion 7:2 (1968), 313; Peel, Aladura.

132. Neil J. Savishinsky, 'Rastafari in the Promised Land: The Spread of a Jamaican
Socioreligious Movement among the Youth of West Africa', African Studies Review
37:3 (1994), 37, 47 n. 22.

133. Margaret Field, Search for Security (London, i960), 349, 41—2.

134. Howard French, 'World Fails to End — Again: If It Knew What I Knew, Pepsi
Would Never Have Underestimated Ghana's Fascination with Eclipses', Guardian
Online, 3 April 2006; see http://www.howardwfrench.com/archives/2006/04

135. Robert Pool, 'On the Creation and Dissolution of Ethnomedical Systems in the
Medical Ethnography of Africa', Africa 64:1 (1994), 13.

136. Hans Debrunner, Witchcraft in Ghana (Accra, [1959] 1961), 96.

137. Ibid. 97; Field, Search for Security, 41, 350.

138. Roger D. Abrahams, 'Foreword', in Jane C. Beck, To Windward of the Land: The
Occult World of Alexander Charles (Bloomington/London, 1979), p. xii.; Patrick A.
Polk, 'Other Books, Other Powers: The 6th and 7th Books of Moses in Afro-Atlantic
Folk Belief, Southern Folklore 56:2 (1999), 120; Jane C. Beck, 'The Implied Obeah
Man', Western Folklore 35:1 (1976), 28 n. 6.

139. An envelope stamped in Fort de France, Martinique, with the date 1952, which was
sold on eBay a few years ago, was addressed to 'Monsieur De Laurence' at the
company's Chicago address. See http://www.luckymojo.com/esoteric/religion/
african/diasporic/caribbeanhinduorishaoccult.html

140. Melville J. Herskovits and Frances S. Herskovits, Trinidad Village (New York, 1947),
228-9.

141. George Eaton Simpson, 'The Acculturative Process in Trinidadian Shango', Anthro-
pological Quarterly 37:1 (1964), 22; idem, 'Baptismal, "Mourning," and "Building"
Ceremonies of the Shouters in Trinidad', Journal of American Folklore 79:314 (1966),
537-50.

142. Kenneth Anthony Lum, Praising His Name in the Dance: Spirit Possession in the Spiritual
Baptist Faith and Orisha Work in Trinidad (Amsterdam, 1999), 120, 161; Maarit

Notes | 339

Laitinen, Marching to Zion: Creolisation in Spiritual Baptist Rituals and Cosmology
(Helsinki, 2002), 31, 79, 279; Stephen Glazier, '"Beyond a Boundary": Life,
Death, and Cricket in Trinidadian Conceptions of the Afterlife', Anthropology and
Humanism 31:2 (2006), 180.

143. Robert A. Hill, 'Dread History: Leonard P. Howell and Millenarian Visions in Early
Rastafari Religions in Jamaica', Epoche, Journal of the History of Religions at UCLA 9
(198 1), 69; cited in Polk, 'Other Books, Other Powers', 120.

144. Erna Brodber, 'Brief Notes on De Laurence in Jamaica', ACIJ Research Review 4
(1999), 91-

145. Ibid.

146. The Daily Gleaner, 20 April 193 1.

147. The Daily Gleaner, 30 January 1934.

148. The Daily Gleaner, 5 February 1934. The book on personal magnetism may have been
a copy of Revelations of a Mysterious Force, Or the Power that Rules the World by Norman
Barclay of Argyll House, Kensington, London. Barclay described himself as a psych-
ologist who had discovered 'the secret of personal magnetism'. I have been unable to
trace an extant copy, but in 191 5 the author advertised it for sale in The Gleaner, to be
sent 'under plain sealed cover', along with The Mystical Oracle or the Complete Fortune-
Teller and Dream Book, a book Barclay claimed was 'written over two hundred years
ago' by a Hindu adept. This obscure occultist obviously saw Jamaican Obeah
practitioners as a prime market for his self-published work on inner forces and
telepathic powers, which evidently made no impact in England's crowded psychic
market.

149. S. Leslie Thornton, '"Obeah" in Jamaica', Journal of the Society of Comparative
Legislation, ns 5:2 (1904), 269.

150. Brodber, 'Brief Notes', 93.

151. E.g. The Jamaica Gazette, 14 October 1965; The Gleaner, 2 September 1968.

152. Jeffrey W. Mantz, 'Enchanting Panics and Obeah Anxieties: Concealing and Dis-
closing Eastern Caribbean Witchcraft', Anthropology and Humanism 32:1 (2007), 23.

153. Brodber, 'Brief Notes', 96—9. On migration see Dereck W. Cooper, 'Migration from
Jamaica in the 1970s: Political Protest or Economic Pull?', International Migration
Review 19:4 (1985) 728-45.

154. The Gleaner, 24 September 1970.

155. The Gleaner, 18 February 1973.

156. It also prohibits 'All publications of the Red Star Publishing Company of Chicago in
the United States of America relating to divination, magic, occultism or supernatural
arts.' The only occult or spiritual publication I have come across from the Red Star
Publishing Company, a producer of pulp detective magazines in the 1930s and 1940s,
is a book called Lighted Candles.

157. Arvilla Payne-Jackson and Mervyn C. Alleyne, Jamaican Folk Medicine (Jamaica,
2004), 99, 101, 116, 136.

I Notes

VII Pulp Magic

1. The Washington Post, 30 March 191 3.

2. See David C. Smith, 'Wood Pulp and Newspapers, 1 867-1900', Business History
Review 38:3 (1964), 328-45.

3. See Erin A. Smith, Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines
(Philadelphia, 2000).

4. Anita P. Forbes, 'Combating Cheap Magazines', English Journal 26:6 (1937), 476—8.

5. Maurice Zolotow, 'The Soothsayer Comes Back', Saturday Evening Post, 17 April
1943; cited in Harry B. Weiss, 'Oneirocritica American', Bulletin of the New York Public
Library 48:6 (1944), 519-20.

6. Lewis de Claremont, The 7 Keys to Power: The Master's Book of Profound Esoteric Law
(New York, [1936] 1949).

7. Jeffrey E. Anderson, Conjure in African American Society (Baton Rouge, 2005), 1 16-20.

8. The Charleston Gazette, 16 December 1929.

9. This account of Dorene is based on Carolyn Morrow Long, Spiritual Merchants:
Religion, Magic, and Commerce (Knoxville, 2001), 209—10; Catherine Yronwode,
'The Enduring Occult Mystery of Lewis de Claremont, Louis de Clermont, Henri
Gamache, Joe Kay, Joseph Spitalnick, Black Herman, Benjamin Rucker, and the
Elusive Mr. Young', available at http://www.luckymojo.com/young.html

0. This biography of Rucker is based on Jim Haskins and Kathleen Benson, Conjure
Times: Black Magicians in America (New York, 2001), ch. 7; Jim Magus, Magical Heroes:
The Lives and Legends of Great African American Magicians (Marietta, GA, 1995).

1. Charles S. Johnson, 'The Rise of the Negro Magazine' , Journal of Negro History 13:1
(1928), 19.

2. Black Herman: Secrets of Magic-Mystery and Legerdemain (New York, 1938), 8-19.

3. Ibid. 32.

4. Catherine Yronwode, 'Spiritual Cleansing with Chinese Wash', available at http://
www.luckymojo.com/chinesewash.html

5. Owen Davies, 'Cunning-Folk in the Medical Market-Place during the Nineteenth
Century', Medical History 43 (1999), 63.

6. See Long, Spiritual Merchants, 229-46; V. E. Tyler, 'The Elusive History of High John
the Conqueror Root', Pharmacy in History 33:4 (1991), 164—6.

7. Guy B. Johnson, 'Newspapers Advertisements and Negro Culture' , Journal of Social
Forces 3:4 (1925), 707-9.

8. Long, Spiritual Merchants, 193—4.

9. Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (Athens, GA,
[1940] 1986), 55, 95.

Notes | 341

20. Erdmann Doane Beynon, 'The Voodoo Cult among Negro Migrants in Detroit',
American Journal of Sociology 43:6 (1938), 898.

21. John H. Burma, 'An Analysis of the Present Negro Press', Social Forces 26:2 (1947),
172-80; George N. Redd, 'The Educational and Cultural Level of the American
Negro' , Journal of Negro Education 19:2 (1950), 244—52.

22. Yvonne P. Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition
(Berkeley, 2003), 142-3.

23. George J. McCall, 'Symbiosis: The Case of Hoodoo and the Numbers Racket', Social
Problems 10:4 (1963), 365; Robert Voeks, 'African Medicine and Magic in the
Americas', Geographical Review 83:1 (1993), 76.

24. Cited in McCall, 'Symbiosis: The Case of Hoodoo', 365.

25. Ibid. 366.

26. Zora Hurston, 'Hoodoo in America', Journal of American Folklore 44 (1931), 411.

27. The Sixth and Seventh Book of Moses (n.p., n.d.), 166.

28. I have been unable to find any publication by Duval Spencer, though Young also
wrote the following booklet under the name Godfrey Spencer, The Secret of Numbers
Revealed; the Magic Power of Numbers (New York, c.1942).

29. Yronwode, 'Enduring Occult Mystery of Lewis de Claremont'; Long, Spiritual
Merchants, 125, 210.

30. Lewis de Claremont, The 7 Keys to Power: The Master's Book of Profound Esoteric Law
(New York, [1936] 1949), 83. See also pp. 80, 81. Intriguingly in several places in the 7
Keys the author seems to write as though a British citizen, such as 'In Great Britain we
are too materialistic, far too incredulous, to appreciate half the wonders of the world.'
This may just be an example of plagiarism though.

31. Loudell F. Snow, 'Mail-Order Magic: The Commercial Exploitation of Folk Belief,
Journal of the Folklore Institute 16 (1979), 62 n. 17.

32. Yronwode has noted that some of the illustrations in Gamache's work were lifted from
OPC catalogues; Yronwode, 'The Enduring Occult Mystery of Lewis de Claremont'.

33. The references are not entirely accurate. In the bibliography of Mystery of the Long Lost
8th, gth and 10th Books, for example, Gamache lists 'Dr Ginsberg: The Kabbalah
Unveiled'. He has obviously conflated Christian D. Ginsburg, The Kabbalah: Its
Doctrines, Development and Literature (London, 1865) with S. L. MacGregor Mathers,
The Kabbalah Unveiled (London, 1887). Other sources included, Joseph W. Williams,
Hebrewism of West Africa: From the Nile to Niger with the Jews (London, 1930); Joseph J.
Williams, Psychic Phenomena in Jamaica (New York, 1934); J. A. Dubois, Hindu
Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies (Oxford, [1817] 1906); R. S. Rattray, Religion and
Art in Ashanti (Oxford, 1927).

34. Douglas Taylor, Black Carib of British Honduras (New York, 1951), 136.

35. Margarite Fernandez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gelbert, Creole Religions of the
Caribbean (New York, 2003), 138; Kean Gibson, Comfa Religion and Creole Language in
a Caribbean Community (New York, 2001), 60; Maarit Laitinen, Marching to Zion:

342 | Notes

Creolisation in Spiritual Baptist Rituals and Cosmology (Helsinki, 2002), 31. Black Herman
also circulated; Christiane Bougerol, Une ethnographie des confiits aux Antilles (Paris,
1997), US-

36. See, for example, The Daily Gleaner 7 December 1946; 11 October 1947.

37. Arvilla Payne-Jackson and Mervyn C. Alleyne, Jamaican Folk Medicine (Jamaica, 2004),
192. De Claremont's numerology pamphlet, How to Get Your Winning Number, which
contains a tell-tale 'Master Code' of three-digit numbers, was recently re-reprinted in
India for distribution there and in Nepal.

38. Jay D. Dobbin, The Jombee Dance of Montserrat (Columbus, 1986), 29.

39. Lewis de Claremont, Leyendas de la Magia del Incienso Hierbas Y Aceite (New York,
1938).

40. Francesco Cordasco and Rocco G. Galatioto, 'Ethnic Displacement in the Interstitial
Community: The Easy Harlem Experience', Phylon 31:3 (1970), 302-12.

41. See, for example, Stanley Fisch, 'Botanicas and Spiritualism in a Metropolis', Mibank
Memorial Fund Quarterly 46:3 (1968), 377-88.

42. Richard M. Dorson, 'Is There a Folk in the City?', Journal of American Folklore 83
(1970), 205-7.

43. Long, Spiritual Merchants, 169-70.

44. Anderson, Conjure in African American Society, 145.

45. Jose Madero, 'I Don't Do Black Magic: Mysterious World of Botanicas', Los Angeles
Mission (December 2004).

46. Joe S. Graham, 'The Role of the Curandero in the Mexican American Folk Medicine
System in West Texas', in Wayland D. Hand (ed.), American Folk Medicine (Berkeley,
1976), 185-6.

47. For example, Libro de San Cipriano: libro completo de verdadera magia 0 sea Tesoro del
hechicero (Barcelona: Maucci, c. 1920); El libro infernal: tratado completo de las ciencias
ocultas que contiene El Libro de San Cipriano (Barcelona: Maucci, c. 1920); O grande livro
de S. Cipriano ou 0 tesouro do feiticeiropor Cipriano (Lisbon, 1923); O verdadeiro livro de S.
Cypriano ou 0 Thesouro dafeiticeira (Lisbon, 1919).

48. R. A. Gomez, 'Spanish Immigration to the United States', The Americas 19:1 (1962),
59-78.

49. Lydia Cabrera, El Monte (Havana, 1954), 275; Erwan Dianteill and Martha Swearingen,
'From Hierography to Ethnography and Back: Lydia Cabrera's Texts and the Written
Tradition in Afro-Cuban Religions', Journal of American Folklore 116 (2003), 275;
Fernando Ortiz, Los Negros Brujos (Miami, [1906] 1973), 164-5.

50. Jerusa Pires Ferreira, O Livro de Sao Cipriano: Uma Legenda de Massas (Sao Paulo, 1992),
116.

51. On the publication history of the Cyprianus book in twentieth-century Spain see
Castro Vicente, 'El Libro de San Cipriano (I)', Hibris 27 (2005); idem, 'El Libro de San
Cipriano (II)', Hibris 28 (2005); Alvaro Cunqueiro, Tesoros y Otras Magias (Barcelona,
1984), 69-72.

Notes | 343

52. Between 1973 and 1975 a New York Spanish-language publisher, Extasis Corps, also
put out a series of books on practical occultism, including El Libro de San Cipriano.

53. In the past few years publishers in Chile have also produced editions: Libro de San
Cipriano (Santiago, 2001); El libro infernal: tratado complete de las ciencias ocultas que
contiene el libro de San Cipriano (Santiago, n.d.).

54. Ciencias Ocultas: Magia, Hipnotismo y Espiritismo (Madrid, n.d.), 5, 9.

55. Ferreira, O Livro de Sao Cipriano, 42.

56. Ibid. 149-50.

57. Sao Cipriano, 0 Bruxo (Rio de Janeiro: Pallas Editora, 2005), 295—315.

58. Diana De G. Brown and Mario Bick, 'Religion, Class, and Context: Continuities and
Discontinuities in Brazilian Umbanda', American Ethnologist 14:1 (1987), 73—93;
Graham M. S. Dann, 'Religion and Cultural Identity: The Case of Umbanda',
Sociological Analysis 40:3 (1979), 208—25.

59. O Verdadeiro grande livro de s. Cypriano (Rio de Janeiro, 1962); Magia prdtica sexual; 0 sexo
base da criacao, 0 sexo em todas as religides, a pratica da magia sexual, a magia sexual na
Umbanda (Rio de Janeiro, 1959).

60. Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and
Healing (Chicago, 1987), 268-9.

61 . Ina Rosing, Die Schliessung des Kreises — Von der Schwarzen Heilung iiber Grau zum Weiss:
Ndchtliche Rituale in den Hochanden Boliviens (Frankfurt, 1991), 255, 263, 320. See also
the review in Current Anthropology 35:3 (1994), 327—8. On their herbal knowledge see
Joseph W. Bastien, Healers of the Andes: Kallawaya Herbalists and Their Medicinal Plants
(Salt Lake City, 1987). There is no mention of the use of books in the 1917 account of
the Kallawaya doctors in G. M. Wrigley, 'The Traveling Doctors of the Andes: The
Callahuayas of Bolivia', Geographical Review 4:3 (1917), 183—96.

62. Ferreira, O Livro de Sao Cipriano, 45-52.

63. Marlene Dobkin,'Fortune's Malice: Divination, Psychotherapy, and Folk Medicine in
Peru' , Journal of American Folklore 82, 324 (1969), p. 133, n. 2.

64. 'Editions of the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses', available at http:/ /www.esotericarchives.
com/moses/ editions.htm

65. John Thompson, 'Santisima Muerte: On the Origin and Development of a Mexican
Occult Image', Journal of the Southwest 40 (1998), 409, 414.

66. Long, Spiritual Merchants, 214—19; http://www.indioproducts.com

67. See Thompson, 'Santisima Muerte'.

68. Madero, 'I Don't Do Black Magic'.

69. See Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (London and New York,
[1985] 1992); Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the
German Modern (Baltimore, 2004; James Webb, The Occult Establishment (La Salle,
1976), ch. 5; Hans-Jiirgen Glowka, Deutsche Okkultgruppen i8?5-ig37 (Munich, 2003);

344 I Notes

Heather Wolfram, 'Supernormal Biology: Vitalism, Parapsychology and the German
Crisis of Modernity, c. 1890— 1933', European Legacy 8:2 (2003), 149—63; Peter-R.
Konig, Der O.T.O. Phanomen Remix (Munich, 2001). English translations of some of
Konig' s detailed research is available at http://user.cyberlink.ch~koenig

70. Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, 27.

71. Quoted in Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 75.

72. Glowka, Deutsche Okkultgruppen, 81—6.

73. See Adolf Spamer Romanusbiichlein . Historisch-philologischer Kommentar zu einem
deutschen Zauberbuch (Berlin, 1958), 36-7; Bachter, 'Anleitung zum Aberglauben',
I32-3-

74. Adolf Spamer, 'Zauberbuch und Zauberspruch', Deutsches Jahrbuch fur Volkskunde 1
( r 955)> 109—126, esp. 122; Bachter, 'Anleitung zum Aberglauben', 134.

75. Battels, Buchversand Gutenberg, Hiilsmann, Max Fischer, and Buchdruckerei
Poetzsch.

76. Philipp Schmidt, Superstition and Magic, trans. Marie Heffernan and A. J. Peeler
(Westminster, MD, [1956] 1963), 227. For a brief account of the case in English see
Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany (Berkeley,
2002), 206-10.

77. On this belief see Bill Jay, 'Images in the Eyes of the Dead', British Journal of
Photography 18 (1981); Veronique Campion- Vincent, 'The Tell-Tale Eye', Folklore
no (1999), 13-24-

78. Figure calculated from Herbert Schafer, Der Okkulttater: Hexenbanner-Magischer Heiler-
Erdentstrahler (Hamburg, 1959), pp. x-xi.

79. Johann Kruse, Hexen Unter Uns? Magic and Zauberglauben in unserer Zeit (Hamburg,
1951), 26, 137.

80. Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 201.

81. See Stephen E. Flowers and Michael Moynihan, Secret King: Karl Maria Wiligut.
Himmler's Lord of the Runes (Waterbury Center and Smithville, 2001).

82. Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 241.

83. Ellic Howe, Urania's Children (London, 1967), 114— 15.

84. Konig, Der O. T. O. Phanomen; English translation of the relevant chapter from an
earlier edition is available online, http:/ /user.cyberlink.ch~koenig/fsi.htm; Christine
E. King, 'Strategies for Survival: An Examination of the History of Five Christian
Sects in Germany 1933— 45', Journal of Contemporary History 14:2 (1979), 211—33.

85. Howe, Urania's Children, 199 n. 1.

86. Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 238-9.

87. One experienced German antiquarian occult bookseller, with an impressive collection
of editions, claims to have a copy of the Sixth and Seventh Books published around 1935
and another from 1939: http://www.buchversand-mueller.de/mosesalt.html

Notes | 345

88. See Gerhard Schormann, Hexenprozesse in Deutschland (Gottingen, 1981); Wolfgang
Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria, trans. J. C. Grayson and David Lederer
(Cambridge, 1997), 37-9.

89. See, for example, James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld (eds), The Nazification of an
Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich (Bloomington/Indianapolis, 1994);
Christa Kamenetsky, 'Folktale and Ideology in the Third Reich' , fournal of American
Folklore 90 (1977), 168—78; James R. Dow, 'German Volkskunde and National
Socialism', fournal of American Folklore 100:397 (1987), 300—4; Richard F. Szippl,
'Folklore under Political Pressure', Asian Folklore Studies 55 (1996), 329—37.

90. Christian Bang, Norske Hexe-Formularer og Magiske Opskrifte (Kristiania, f 1 90 1—2] 2005) .

91. 'Institutions', Current Anthropology 4:4 (1963), 370.

92. Hannjost Lixfeld, 'The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Umbrella Organisa-
tions of German Volkskunde during the Third Reich', Asian Folklore Studies 50 (1991),
101-3.

93. Spamer, 'Zauberbuch und Zauberspruch'.

94. See, in particular, G. L. Mosse, 'The Mystical Origins of National Socialism', fournal
of the History of Ideas 22 (1961), 81-96.

95. See Willem de Blecourt, 'The Witch, Her Victim, the Unwitcher and the
Researcher: The Continued Existence of Traditional Witchcraft', in Willem de
Blecourt, Ronald Hutton, and Jean Sibyl La Fontaine (eds), Athlone History of
Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, vol. vi: The Twentieth Century (London, 1999), 214—15.

96. Harry Bergholz, 'Survey of Book and Music Publishing in Post- War Germany',
Modern Language fournal 34:8 (1950), 616-25.

97. See, for example, Luke Springman, 'Poisoned Hearts, Diseased Minds, and American
Pimps: The Language of Censorship in the Schund und Schmutz Debates', German
Quarterly 68:4 (1995), 408-29.

98. Mary Louise Adams, 'Youth, Corruptibility, and English-Canadian Postwar
Campaigns against Indecency, 1948— 1955', fournal of the History of Sexuality 6:1
(1995), 89-117.

99. Springman, 'Poisoned Hearts', 421.

100. Von A. Eigner and O. Prokop, 'Das sechste und siebente Buch Moses: Zur Frage der
Kriminogenitat von Biichern und besonders laienmedizinischer Schundliteratur', in
O. Prokop (ed.), Medizinischer Okkultismus (Jena, 1964), 270.

101. See, for example, Jane Viers, Wovon eine Frau sonst nicht spricht (Brunswick, 1950);
Marion Stephani, Schbne Biiste — -ja aber wie? (Brunswick, 1957).

102. See Manfred Nagl, 'SF, Occult Sciences, and Nazi Myths', Science-Fiction Studies 1:3
(1974), 185-97, esp. n. 25.

103. Schmidt, Superstition and Magic, 22.

104. The Dallas Morning News 16 June 1963; George Hendricks, 'German Witch Mania',
Western Folklore 23:2 (1964), 121; Reuters despatch from Bonn in the Los Angeles

346 | Notes

Times, 31 July 1955; Taras Lukach, 'Witchcraft in Germany', Western Folklore 15:1
(1956), 65-6.

105. Schafer, Der Okkultdter, 106, 96.

106. Schmidt, Superstition and Magic, 221.

107. Herbert Auhofer, Aberglaube und Hexenwahn heute: Aus der Unterwelt unserer Zivilisa-
tion (Freiberg, i960), 9.

108. For discussion on Kruse's views see Joachim Friedrich Baumhauer, Johann Kruse und
der 'neuzeitliche Hexenwahn' (Neumiinster, 1984); Dagmar Unverhau,' "Hexen unter
uns?" — Die Vorstellungen eines modernen Kampfers gegen Hexenwahn aus der
Sicht der historischen Hexenforschung', in Dieter Harmening (ed.), Hexen Heute:
Magische Traditionen und neue Zutaten (Wiirzburg, 1991), 55-79.

109. Schmidt, Superstition and Magic, 219.
no. Baumhauer, Johann Kruse, 85.

in. Ibid. 118.

112. Tagesspiegel, 30 September 2001.

113. James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld, 'National Socialistic Folklore and Overcoming
the Past in the Federal Republic of Germany', Asian Folklore Studies 50 (1991), 117-53.

114. Will-Erich Peuckert, 'Die Egyptischen Geheimnisse', ARV 10 (1954), 40-96; idem,
'Das 6. and 7. Buch Mosis', Zeitschrift fur deutsche Philologie 76 (1957), 163—87.

115. For a discussion of this phenomena see de Blecourt, 'The Witch, Her Victim', 156.

116. Newsweek, 4 April i960.

117. Inge Schock, Hexenglaube in der Gegenwart (Tubingen, 1978), 21—2; Baumhauer,
Johann Kruse, 152-6, 164-7.

118. Will-Erich Peuckert, 'Hexensalben', Medizinischer Monatsspiegel 8 (i960), 169—74.

119. The Times Recorder, 13 April i960.

120. Baumhauer, Johann Kruse, 87. For a detailed account of the ensuing legal battle see
ibid. 83-97.

121. Ibid. 96.

122. See, for example, Winnipeg Free Press, 17 August 1957.

123. Kurt E. Koch, Christian Counselling and Occultism (Berghausen, 1972), 127.

124. See Bill Ellis, 'Kurt E. Koch and the "Civitas Diaboli": German Folk Healing as
Satanic Ritual Abuse of Children', Western Folklore 54:2 (1995), 77-94.

125. Kurt Koch, The Devil's Alphabet (Grand Rapids, 1969), 12.

126. Ibid. 20.

127. Koch, Devil's Alphabet, preface to fourth edition.

128. Koch, Christian Counselling, 161— 2, 193.

129. Kurt Koch, Between Christ and Satan (Grand Rapids, 1962), 131.

130. Ibid. 89.

Notes | 347

31. Koch, Christian Counselling, 155.

32. Margaret Field, Search for Security (London, i960), 350.

33. Koch, Christian Counselling, 161, 162, 133.

34. Kurt Koch, Gottes Treue: Aus Meinem Liebe, Teil 1 (Lavel, 1980), 20-2; passage
translated in Ellis, 'Kurt E. Koch and the "Civitas Diaboli" ', 82.

35. Hans Sebald, Witchcraft: The Heritage of a Heresy (New York, 1978), 91.

36. Kramer Verlag (1979 and 1984); Schikowski Verlag (1976 and 1980).

VIII Lovecraft, Satan, and Shadows

1. Evelyn Underhill, The Column of Dust (London, 1909), 8; Christopher Mcintosh,
The Devi! 's Bookshelf (Wellingborough, 1985), 132.

2. William Hope Hodgson, The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder, edited with an
introduction by David Stuart Davies (Ware, 2006), 45-6.

3. New DNB; David Stuart Davies, 'Introduction', in Hodgson, The Casebook of
Carnacki.

4. See Timothy H. Evans, 'A Last Defense against the Dark: Folklore, Horror, and the
Uses of Tradition in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft', fournal of Folklore Research 42:1
(2005), 99-135-

5. See H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, edited with an
introduction and notes by S. T. Joshi (London, 1999), p. xix.

6. H. P. Lovecraft: Uncollected Letters (West Warwick, RI, 1986), 37.

7. For details on these various fictional books see entries in Daniel Harms, The
Encyclopedia Cthulhiana (1998).

8. On Lovecraft's development of the Necromonicon see Lovecraft, Call of Cthulhu, 380-
1, 387; Daniel Harms and John Wisdom Gonce III, The Necronomicon Files (Boston,
MA, [1998] 2003), 8-28.

9. Lovecraft, Call of Cthulhu, 84.

10. Ibid. 112.

11. H. P. Lovecraft, 'Supernatural Horror in Literature'; available at http://gaslight.
mtroyal.ca/ superhor.htm

12. See Harms and Gonce, Necronomicon Files, 12-15, 9%~ 9-

13. Quoted ibid. 13.

14. Lovecraft, Call of Cthulhu, 380-1.

15. H. P. Lovecraft: Uncollected Letters, 37.

16. For good accounts ofVoynich, his manuscript, and the various theories attached to it
see Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone, The Friar and the Cipher (New York, 2005);
Gerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill, The Voynich Manuscript (London, 2004).

348 | Notes

17. Lynn Thorndike, review of The Cipher of Roger Bacon by William Romaine Newbold,
American Historical Review 34:2 (1929), 317.

18. Quoted in Harms and Gonce, Necronomicon Files, 28.

19. H. P. Lovecraft: Uncollected Letters, 37-8.

20. See Dave Evans, The History of British Magick after Crowley (Harpenden, 2007), 336-50.

21 . This point is well made in Dan Clore, 'The Lurker on the Threshold of Interpretation:
Hoax Necronomicons and Paratextual Noise', Lovecraft Studies 42—3 (20001), available
at http://www.hplovecraft.com/ study/ articles

22. Montague Summers, The Gritnoire, and Other Supernatural Stories (London, 1936), 254.

23. On Summers and his views on witchcraft see Juliette Wood, 'The Reality of Witch
Cults Reasserted: Fertility and Satanism', in Jonathan Barry and Owen Davies (eds),
Witchcraft Historiography (Basingstoke, 2007), 76-85; New DNB.

24. Summers, Grimoire, 265.

25. See Jacqueline Simpson, 'Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why?', Folklore
105 (1994), 89—96; Caroline Oates and Juliette Wood, A Coven of Scholars: Margaret
Murray and Her Working Methods (London, 1998).

26. Gerald Gardner, The Meaning of Witchcraft (New York, [1959] 1988), 10.

27. Ibid. 11.

28. On the debate over the content and origin of Gardner's Book of Shadows see Ronald
Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford, 1999),
226—36; Doreen Valiente, The Rebirth of Witchcraft (London, 1989); Leo Ruickbie,
Witchcraft out of the Shadows: A Complete History (London, 2004), 106—14; Aidan A.
Kelly, Crafting the Art of Magic (St Paul, 1991); Philip Heselton, Gerald Gardner and the
Cauldron of Inspiration (2003); Hudson 'Morgann' Frew, 'Crafting the Art of Magic: A
Critical Review', available at http://www.wildideas.net/temple/library/frew.htiTil

29. Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, 227.

30. 'Gerald Gardner's Library: Authors D through G', available at http://www.
newwiccanchurch.net/gglibrary/ dg.htm

31. Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, 229-30.

32. See letters transcribed in Morgan Davis, 'From Man to Witch: Gerald Gardner
1946— 1949', http://www.geraldgardner.com, 42—3.

33. Frew, 'Crafting the Art of Magic', 12.

34. For a concise breakdown of these influences see Ruickbie, Witchcraft, 113.

35. Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, 207; Valiente, Rebirth of Witchcraft, 41—2.

36. See Jenny Blain and Robert J. Wallis, 'Sites, Texts, Contexts and Inscriptions of
Meanings: Investigating Pagan "Authenticities" in a Text-Based Society', The Pom-
egranate 6:2 (2004), 231—52.

37. Linda Jencson, 'Neopaganism and the Great Mother Goddess: Anthropology as
Midwife to a New Religion', Anthropology Today y.2, (1989), 4; Tanya Luhrmann,
Persuasions of the Witch's Craft (Oxford, 1989), 238—9. For a personal reflection on this

Notes | 349

see Julian Vayne, 'The Discovery of Witchcraft: An Exploration of the Changing Face
of Witchcraft through Contemporary Interview and Personal Reflection', in Hannah
E. Johnston and Peg Aloi (eds), The New Generation of Witches: Teenage Witchcraft in
Contemporary Culture (Aldershot, 2007), ch. 4.

38. See Jencson, 'Neopaganism and the Great Mother Goddess', 4. From a Caribbean
perspective see Erwan Dianteill and Martha Swearingen, 'From Hierography
to Ethnography and Back: Lydia Cabrera's Texts and the Written Tradition in
Afro-Cuban Religions', fournal of American Folklore 116 (2003).

39. Daniel Mannix, The Hell-Fire Club: The Rise and Fall of a Shocking Secret Society
(London, 1959).

40. Massimo Polidoro, 'Blind Alley: The Sad and "Geeky" Life of William Lindsay
Gresham — Notes on a Strange World', Skeptical Inquirer (July— August, 2003).

41. The facts about LaVey's early life, as far as they can be established, are provided in
Michael A. Aquino, The Church of Satan, 5th edn (2002), ch. 2. For LaVey's own
version of events see Blanche Barton, The Secret Life of a Satanist (Los Angeles, 1990).
See also http://www.churchofsatan.com/Pages/HistoryMain.html

42. Barton, Secret Life, 23.

43. This account of the Satanic Bible's genesis and content is based on that in Aquino, The
Church of Satan, ch. 5.

44. 'Avon (publishers)', available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avon_Books

45. Anton LaVey, Satanic Bible (New York, 1970), 53.

46. Ibid. 50.

47. Aquino, Church of Satan, 53.

48. Joshua Gunn, 'Prime-Time Satanism: Rumor-Panic and the Work of Iconic Topoi',

Visual Communication 4 (2005), 102; James R. Lewis, 'Diabolical Authority: Anton
LaVey, The Satanic Bible and the Satanist "Tradition" ', Marburg Journal of Religion 7:1
(2002), 9.

49. On the number of practising Satanists and the various groups see Graham Harvey,
'Satanism in Britain Today' , Journal of Contemporary Religion 10 (1995), 3 53—66; Jean
Sibyl La Fontaine, 'Satanism and Satanic Mythology', in Willem de Blecourt, Ronald
Hutton, and Jean Sibyl La Fontaine (eds), Athlone History of Witchcraft and Magic in
Europe, vol. vi: The Twentieth Century (London, 1999), 94— 109; James R. Lewis, 'Who
Serves Satan? A Demographic and Ideological Profile', Marburg Journal of Religion 6:2
(2001), 1-10.

50. William H. Swatos, 'Adolescent Satanism: A Research Note on Exploratory Survey
Data', Review of Religious Research 34:2 (1992), 161.

51. Lewis, 'Who Serves Satan?', 7.

52. Randy Lippert, 'The Construction of Satanism as a Social Problem in Canada',
Canadian Journal of Sociology 15:4 (1990), 433.

53. Cited in Diane E. Taub and Lawrence D. Nelson, 'Satanism in Contemporary
America: Establishment or Underground?', Sociological Quarterly 34:3 (1993), 527.

350 | Notes

54. Bill Ellis, Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture (Lexington, 2004),
87-9.

55. Satanic Bible, 136.

56. 'The Sigil of Baphomet', available at http://www.churchofsatan.com/Pages/
BaphometSigil.html

57. Gunn, 'Prime-Time Satanism', 105. A recent Brazilian edition of the Cipriano
contains a version of the Baphomet symbol on the cover; O Traditional Livro Negro
de Sao Cipriano (Pallas Editora; Rio de Janeiro, 2006).

58. Satanic Bible, 21.

59. Anton LaVey, 'The Church of Satan, Cosmic Joy Buzzer', reprinted in Barton, Secret
Life, 248.

60. The Cloven Hoof 3:9 (1971).

61. Satanic Bible, 103; Barton, Secret Life, 248.

62. Anton LaVey, The Satanic Rituals: Companion to the ' Satanic Bible' (New York, 1998), 21.

Epilogue

1. Maarit Laitinen, Marching to Zion: Creolisation in Spiritual Baptist Rituals and Cosmology
(Helsinki, 2002), 31; Arvilla Payne-Jackson and Mervyn C. Alleyne, Jamaican Folk
Medicine (Jamaica, 2004), 192. On the influence of Gonzalez Wippler's populist works
see, for example, Donald J. Cosentino, 'Repossession: Ogun in Folklore and Litera-
ture', in Sandra T. Barnes (ed.), Africa's Ogun: Old World and New (Bloomington,
1989), 297.

2. Tanya Krzywinska, 'Hubble-Bubble, Herbs, and Grimoires: Magic, Manichaeanism
and Witchcraft in Buffy', in Rhonda Wilcox (ed.), Fighting the Forces: What's at Stake in
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Lanham, 2002), 192. On the influence of these series amongst
teen witches see Helen A. Berger and Douglas Ezzy, Teenage Witches: Magical Youth
and the Search for the Self (New Brunswick, 2007), 39-40; Hannah E. Johnston and Peg
Aloi (eds), The New Generation Witches: Teenage Witchcraft in Contemporary Culture
(Aldershot, 2007). On the historical context and cultural ramifications of the screen
presentation of witches see Marion Gibson, Witchcraft: Myths in American Culture
(London, 2007), 216-23.

3. Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (London, 2004), 14.

Index

Illustrations are indicated in italic

AMORC see Ancient Mystical Order Rosa;
Crucis

Abra-Melin 180, 217, 230

Act for the Suppression of Fortune Telling

(Pennsylvania) 201-2
Adelung, Christoph 1 18-19
Affair of the Poisons (France) 91,92
Africa 166-167

Delaurence and 224-7
see also Cameroon; Nigeria; Ghana; Sierra
Leone

African-Americans 190, 210—13, 2II > 2I 4,

217, 238-9
Agilar, Moyse-Joseph 111-12
Agnppa le Noir' 113,114
Agrippa von Nettesheim, Heinrich

Cornelius 47—8, 50, 79—80
Opera (attrib.) 48, 52, 65, 71
Akkadians 8

al-Buni, Ahmad bin Ali 27
al-Kindi 36

Aladura movement see Church of the Lord

(Aladura) movement
Albertinus, Alexander 59
Albertus Magnus 14, 38, 57 see also secrets

of Albert (experiments of Albert)

Albertus Magnus's Egyptian Secrets 120, 122,

197, 222, 227, 229, 233, 277
Alexander IV, Pope 43
Alexander VI, Pope 35
Alexandria 20-1
Alfonso VI, King of Castile 26
alherces (Arabic texts) 76
Ali, Noble Drew 211-12
almanacs: astrological 56 see also American

Almanack;
Poor Richard's Almanack
Almandal (Solomon) 14, 39, 40
alphabets: India 2
Alvares, Domingo 88
America 139-67 see also United States
American Almanack 143
amulets: Jewish 23,75
Anastasi, Giovanni 172-3
Ancient Book of Formulas, The (de

Claremont) 240
Ancient Mystical Order Rosa? Crucis

(AMORC) 185, 224
Anderson, John 204-5
Angerstein, Fritz 248—9

animals 25, 26, 57, 161 see also cats; chickens
Anneke, Tempel 66

352 | Index

anti-rationalism 134
anti-Semitism 247
Antimaquis 32

Antiochus Eprphanes 18-19
Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ, The

(Dowling) 212, 225
Aquino, Michael 274—5
Arabic texts see alherces; Koran
Arabs 25-7

Arbatel of Magic 52-3, 65, 69, 143, 247

Arde'et (The Disciples) 33

Argenson, Marc Antoine Rene de Voyer,

marquis d' 97
Argenson, Marc-Rene de Voyer d' 95
Ariosophy 247
Aristotle 24—5
Ark (Noah) 7, 8
Armadel 97
Arndius, Josua 68

Ars Notoria (Solomon) 14—15,63,65
Art of Prolonging Lfe, The (Hufeland) 199
Ascham, Anthony 33

Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century, The 137—8

astrology 41, 63-4, 137, 202, 204

Aubrey, John 56

Auhofer, Dr Herbert 254, 259

Aupetit, Pierre 73

Austin Friars 36

Austria 120

Avignon (France) 83

Ayton, Revd William Alexander 179

Bacon, Francis 169
Bacon, Roger 37
Baker, Ivanhoe 229
Bale, John 35, 37

Balsamo, Giuseppe see Cagliostro, Count

Bang, Anton Christian 251

Baptists see German Seventh Day Baptists;

Spiritualist Baptists
Barker, Robert 39
Barozzi, Lucia 82
Barrett, Francis 135
Bartels (publisher) 248
Batak (Sumatra) 2-3, 4
Baum, Johannes 248
Baum Verlag (publisher) 250
Bavaria 59
Baxter, Richard 52

Bayonne (France) 112— 13
Beaumont, Nicolas de 68
Bechtel, Norman 210
Beckford, William: Vathek 266
Behold the Sign (AMORC) 185
Beirut 20

Beissel, Conrad 141
Belize 239
Belloc, Pierre 107
Beringos Fratres 98, 99, 122
Berkeley, Edmund 140
Bernard, Richard 83
Bernard, Samuel 106
Bernardi, Bartholomeo 110
Bible

and gnmoires 107

and hoodoo 214—15

New Testament 15-16,19

occult power of 3-4

Old Testament 4, 10, 14

parchment 23

psalms 240
Bible of Magic (Musallam) 248
Biblice Magica 1 1 8

Bibliotheque bleue 95, 98, 107, 109, 115,

120, 159, 176
Black Agnppa see Agrippa le Noir'
Black Bibles: Finland 132
'black books' (124, 126, 128—9, J 3 I— 2 > 204— 5
Black Herman see Rucker, Benjamin
Black Herman (Kay) 234, 236, 240, 242
black magic 23, 27 see also Sefer ha-Razim

(Book of Mysteries)
Black Raven, Tire 119
Black Shrmers 211
Blackwood, Algernon 265
Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna: his Unveiled 175
blessings: America 144
Bloch, Robert: De Vermis Mysteriis 264
Blymyer, John 207, 209
Bodenham, Anne 66, 84
Bodin, Jean 68, 78
Boehme, Jacob 53
Boguet, Henri 59
Bois, Paul 180

'Bok of ye Art Magical, Ye' (Gardner) 271
Bombatus von Hohenheim, Philippus
Aureolus Theophrastus
see Paracelsus

Index | 353

Bonatti, Guido 64

Bonaventura, Giovanni Battista 76

Boniface VIII, Pope 35

Book of Black Magic and of pacts (W aite) 181,

182, 223, 230
Book of Buried Pearls, The 172
Book of Ceremonial Magic 182
'Book of conjurations four obtaining

treasures' 112
Book of Durrow 4
Book of Enoch 7

Book Of Honorius see Grimoire du Pape Honorius
Book of Life 83

Book of Magical Arts , Tire (Delaurence) 225,

229, 230, 232
Book of Mormon 148, 149
Book of Mysteries see Sefer ha-Razim
Book of Prayer with Uses and Power of Psalms

(Oshitelu) 225
Book of Raziel 29, 63
Book of Shadows 270-1, 279, 280
Book of Simon the Magus 17, 245
Book of Sothis 12

Book of St Cipnan see Libro de San Cipriano

Book of the Dead (Budge) 183

Book of the Key of Solomon (Sepher Maphteah

Shelomoh) 17
Book of the Mediums, The (Rivail) 157
'Book of the Offices of Spirits' 69
Book of the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin 180, 182
Book of the Spirits, The (Rivail) 157
book trade

Europe 73—80

France 77, 104, 106
Italy 79

London 134-5

United States 88, 220, 221
books

burning 16, 18-21, 28, 34, 37, 38, 39,

68, 74, 79, 253, 260
censorship 74, 112, 137, 250, 252-3
dangerous 1
Devil's 82-4
dream 144, 190
and enslavement 158
exorcism manuals 57, 59
invention 7

Jewish 74-75 see also Kabbalah; Torah
leechbooks 22

and magic 2, 3

and new media 278—9

occult 213

papyrus 18

printed 5

pulp 233, 252-3

see also Bible; black books; chapbooks;
grimoires; Koran
Bordeaux Parlement (France) 78-9
Bordelon, Laurent 97
Born, Ignaz Edler von 170
Bosse, Mane 92, 128
botdnicas 242-3, 247
Bourg Caunegre, Mathieu du 113
Bragard, Nicolas Noel le 64
Brahmi scripts (India) 2—3
branding 145
Brazil 88, 85, 157
Brinvilliers, Marquise de 91
British Museum 170, 173
Brodber, Erna 228
Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross 47
Broughton, Luke 202
Brown, Dan 281
Browne, John 89
Brugnoli, Candido 60
Brye, Therese de 67
Buch Jezira, Das 123, 248, 254
Budge, Ernest Alfred Wallis 183-4
Buenos Aires 245

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series) 280-1
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 177, 178, 262
Burnet, William 140
Butler, Eliza 120

Cabiana, Boniface 79

Cable, George W.: Hie Grandissimes 155

Cademusto, Galeazzo 63

Cagliostro, Count 94, 169—70

Cahagnet, Louis-Alphonse 178

Cairo: Genizah 30

Cajuns 154

Calderon. Pedro 33

Calderon, Pedro Ruiz see Ruiz Calderon, Pedro

Calvmists 59, 83-4

Cameroon 224, 226

Campana, Don 39

Campbell Thompson, Reginald 166

Canaan (son of Ham) 8

354 I Index

Canada see Quebec
Candido, Dr 225
Candle Burning Magic (Riva) 279
cannibalism 161— 2
Cannon, John 66
Canonical Law 68
Caracciolo, Jeronimo de 86
Carcassonne (France) 40
Caribbean
Bible 3-4

Delaurence and 227—3 1
folk medicine 165

Obeah 156, 159-60, 165, 185, 228, 229
religious traditions 155-7
see also Belize; Grenada; Guadeloupe;
Haiti; St Lucia; Trinidad;
Windward Islands

Carret, Vincent ill

Carrington Bolton, Henry 189—90

Casanova, Giacomo 94

Cassar, Vittono 67

Cassendi, Geraud 40

Castafiega, Martin de 75

Catholicism 156

cats 96, 166

Celestial Letter 192

Celsus 10, 16

censorship 74, 112, 137, 250, 252-3

see also books: burning; Index of Prohibited
Books; legislation
Centum Regnum (One Hundred Kings) 54
Chaldea 8

Champollion, Jean Francois 170
chapbooks

America 88, 144

Britain 132, 134, 137

Denmark 128

France 95, 107

Germany 121

Sweden 128
Charmed (TV series) 280
charms 107, 120, 129, 131, 149, 191, 205,

207, 251
Chicago 210—215, 217—218
Chicago Defender (newspaper) 212-213
chickens 106, 112, 161
China 3
chiromancy 85

Christianity 3—4, 18—21, 32 see also Jesus Christ

Church of Satan 273-4

Church of the Lord (Aladura) movement

(Nigeria) 225
Clarke, Susanna: Jonathan Strange and

Mr Norrell 282
Clavicula Salomonis 15, 39, 52, 54-5, 63,

65, 67, 74, 78, 81-2, 94, 96, 97, 106,
110, 159, 176, 180, 227, 271

see also Zecorbeni sen clavicula Salomonis
Clavicule de Y enchiridion du Pape Leon 35
Clavicule of Virgil 78
clef de la magie noire, La (Guaita) 275
Clemmensen, Jens 123,126
clergy 36-7, 40, 61-3, 129
Cloven Hoof, The 275, 277
Club against Demons (Menghi) 59
The Club Dumas, The (Perez-Reverte) 281-2
Colombia 157-158
colporteurs (peddlars): France 98, 100
Complete Fortune Teller and Dream Book

(Russel) 190
Congregation of the Holy Office 79
conjurations

and exorcism 59

France 106

Paracelsus on 48

Satanic see Book of the Key of Solomon;

necromancy
see also 'Agrippa le Noir'; 'Book of

conjurations four obtaining treasures';
Long Lost Friend; Picatrix
Conjuror's Magazine 133, 134
Constantinople 28—9
conversos (converted Jews) 74, 76
Corpus hermeticum 46

Corpus of German Formulae for Charms

and Incantations 251
Council of Toledo 21
Council of Trent 62
covenants 84
Craft, The (film) 280
Creoles 157
Critical Review, The 135
Crowley, Aleister 184-5, 2 47
Crowther, Timothy: notebook 38
Cuevas, Francisco de 85
cuneiform writing 8, 173
cunning-folk 70—1, 183
Africa 167

Index | 355

America 90, 139, 145, 152, 197 see also
Roback, Charles W.

Britain 132, 150

England 66-67 see abo Crowther,
Timothy

Denmark 123, 132

France 79

Germany 250

Iceland 72

Jewish 75

Martinique 159

Sweden 131

Venice 82
Curros Enriquez, Manuel 116
Curry, John 207, 209
Cutler, Alpheus 149
Cyprian of Antioch, St 32—3, 126

'Cyprianiugs Kunstboeg' 129, 132

Cyprianus 125

Cyprianus (Ulfkjaer) 130

' Cyprianus Hollenzwdnge' 126

Cyprien Mago ante Conversionem 1 1 5

Libro de San Cipriano 1 14-17, 131, 243,
245, 246

lille Udtog of Syprianus, En 131
Cyprian of Carthage, St: Of the Unity of the
Church 128

D. Faustus Original Geister Commando 121, 122
D.Johannis Faust Magia celeberrima 122
Da Vinci Code (Brown) 281
d'Abano, Peter 38
Daemonolatreia (Remigius) 265
Daemonologie (James I and VI, King) 68
Daemonomagie oder Geschichte des Glaubens

und Zauberei 123
Dalok, Elena 41
Daniel of Morley 26

Davidson, Peter 179; Man, Know Thyself 185

de Claremont, Lewis 240, 242

De la demonomanie des sorciers (Bodin) 97

De necromanticis imaginibus 3 7

De occulta philosophia (Agrippa) 47, 52, 54, 141

De occultis literarum notis (Delia Porta) 86

De prcestigiis dcemonum (Weyer) 69

dead, raising the 23

Dead Sea Scrolls 7

Debrunner, Hans 226

Dee, John 52

Del Rio, Martin 28
Delaurence, Scott and Company

(Chicago) 214, 216, 230, 231, 232

catalog 221, 228
Delaurence, William Lauron 188, 215-24;

overseas influence 224-3 1
Delia Porta, Giambattista 57
Delp, Verna 209-10
Demonic Bible 277
demonologists 45, 68—70, 78, 82
Denley, John 134-5, !37> 177
Denmark 123, 126
Detcheverry, Gracien 11 3-14
Devil

and exorcism 59

and Faust legend 50,51

and magic 45

pacts with 82-3, 124, 125, 126

popes and 3 5

and Reformation 44—5

and witchcraft 82-4

see also conjurations
Devil of Magic, The see Zauber Teuffel, Der
Devil Worship in France (Waite) 181, 187
Devil's books 50, 82—4, 89, 90
Devil's Scourge, The (Menghi) 59-60
Dibclin, Thomas Frognall 104
Dieterich, Albrecht 251
Diocletian, Emperor 19
Disappointment (comic opera) 146-7
Disciples, The see Arde'et
Discours des sorciers (Boguet) 97
Discoverie of Witchcraft (Scot) 70, 132, 134, 139,

141, 143, 147, 149, 150, 151
Disquisitionum Magicarum 113
divination 18 see also Prophetesses and Cyprianus'

Big Dream Book
D'occulta philosophia 64
Doct.Joh. Fausten's Miracul, Kunst und

Wunderbuch 122
Dogme et ritual de la haute magie (Levi) 1 76
Dorene Publishing Company (New York) 234,
241

Douthal, James 229

Dowling, Levi: The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus
Christ 212

Dragon rouge 104, 105, 109, 115, 122, 159
dragon's blood 238
Drake, Fred 216

356 | Index

dream books 144, 190

Dresden Royal Library 119, 120

drugs, hallucinogenic 258

Duquet, Joseph-Norbert: Le Vertable Petit

Albert 154
Duthil, Francois 107—8

Earl, Robert Stephen 160

Easy Pocket Tricks That You Can Do

(Rucker) 236
Ebert, Friedrich Adolf 1 1 9—20
Ecuador 158

Eddy, Mary Baker Science and Health with Key

to the Scriptures 243
Editora Espiritualista (Rio de Janeiro) 245
Egypt 8—9, 168—73 see a k° Genizah (Cairo)
Egyptian Magic (Budge) 183
Egyptian Magic (Fan) 183
Egyptische Geheimnisse, Die (Egyptian

Secrets) 121, 257
Egyptology 175
Eighth Book of Moses 10- 11
Elementa magica 65
Elliott, Charles, Wyllys 200
Empeyta, Charles 110
Emrich, Will 254
Encausse, Gerard see Papus
Enchiridion Leonis Papa; 92, 96, 97, 107, 128,

159, 245

see also Clavicule de V enchiridion du Pape Leon
Enlightenment 93—138
Enoch (Idris) 7, 8, 11
Ephesia grammata (Ephesian letters) 19
Ephesus 19

Ephrata (Pennsylvania) 141
Erghome, Friar John 36
Espinel, Jeronimo 78
Euclid 34
Eudoxus 7
evil 231

Evil Spirit Texts 173
exorcism manuals 57, 59
experiments of Albert see secrets of Albert
Eymeric, Nicholas 41

fairies 60-1

Famous historie of Fryer Bacon 37-8
fantasy, literary 261—8
Fard, W. P. 239

Farr, Florence 182, 183

Faust legend 49—50, 49, 119, 128, 144

D. Faustus Original Geister Commando 121,
122

D.Johannis Faust Magia celeberrima 122

Doct. Joh. Fausten's Miracul, Kunst und
Wunderbuch 122

Julius Ciprianus den XII & DJ. Faustus
Dreyfaices Hollen Schwang' 123

Faustbog' 123

Faust's Hollenzwang 118
faux sorciers (Paris) 95—96
Feijoo, Benito Jeronimo 116— 17
Fell, John, Bishop of Oxford 128
Ferdinand the Catholic, King of Spain 28
Ferrand, Jacques 69
Ficino, Marcilio 46
Fiery Dragon, the see Dragon rouge
Finland 132

Flagellum dcemonum, he 106
Flamichon, Francois 113
'flying evil' 23 1
folklore

Estonia 132

Finland 132

Germany 118, 250-1, 257-8
Ford, Michael W.: Lucifenan Witchcraft 277
Forman, Simon 63—4
Forrest, Colonel Thomas 147
fortune-telling 135—6, 137, 171, 172

Act for the Suppression of Fortune Telling
(Pennsylvania) 201-2
Forty-Three Kings of Spirits, The 54—5
Foulon, John 20

Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, The 50, 51, 52,
53, 54, 65, 66, 68, 69, 132, 134, 139, 147,
247

see also Arbatel of Magic
Frailey, Dr 145
France 112— 115

Affair of the Poisons 92, 95

Bordeaux Parlement 78-9

book trade 77

colporteurs (peddlars) 98, 100

Inquisitions 68, 77

magic 93-1 1 1

publishing industry 122

witch trials 73,91—2

witchcraft 83

Index | 357

Franklin, Benjamin 143, 146
Fratermtas Rosae Crucis 178
Freemasonry 94, 169-70, 211 see also Ordo

Templi Orientis (OTO)
French, Howard 226
French culture: Caribbean 160
Freund in der Noth, Der 191— 2
Fronto (Spanish monk) 2 1

Gahala Regnum 54

Gabrielopolos 29

gacetas (gazeteers): Spain 116, 117

gadedzafe healers 165

Galicia (Spain): treasure hunting 1 16-17

Galigai, Leonora 75

Gamache, Henri 241, 242

Mystery of the 8th, gth and 10th Books of

Moses 241, 271
Gamle Richards Swartkonst-bok 142
Gardner, Gerald 270—2
Gaspe, Philippe Aubert de: L'Influence d'un

livre 153-4
Gassner, Johann Joseph 93
Gaufridy, Louis 73
gazetteers see gacetas
Gebelin, Antoine Court de 169
Geneva 1 09-11
Genizah (Cairo) 30
Gentleman's Magazine, The 137
geomancy 38
George of Thessalonike 20
Georgievitz-Weitzer, Demeter see Surya, G. W.
Gerbert see Silvester II, Pope
German Seventh Day Baptists 141
German Society for Protection against

Superstition (DEGEA) 254
German Theosophical Society 247
Germans: America 191— 7
Germantown (Pennsylvania) 140— 1, 145
Germany 59, 247-61
chapbooks 128-9
Faust legend 118-23
Gertrude of Helfta, St 120— 1
Gervase of Tilbury 24
Ghana 225-6, 260
Ghayat al-Hakim see Picatrix
Giaonna La Siracusana 67
Giles, Blessed 27
Gnostics 16

God: Jewish names for 3 1

Godevent (priest) 73

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 118

Golden Dawn see Hermetic Order of the

Golden Dawn
goldne Tabella Rabellina, Die 119
Goncalves, Maria 85
Gonzalez- Wippler, Migene 279—80
Gonzalo, Saint 158

Gospel According to Spiritism, The (Rivail) 157
Gottskalksson, Oddur 72
Graham, George 138

Grand Albert 57, 97, 98, 109, 112, 159, 164, 165
Grand Grimoire 101, 103-4, 10 3, I0 9>

115, 176
see also Dragon rouge
Grand Oracle of Heaven, The 137
Grange, Jean 115
Great Book of Black Magic, The 229
Great Book of Magical Art, Hindu Magic and

East Indian Occultism, The

(Delaurence) 216-17, 22 S, 2 3°
Great Book of Secret Hindu Ceremonial and

Talismanic Magic
(Delaurence) 227
Great Copt 169-70

Greaves, John 169; Pyramidographia 168
Greek culture: Egypt 9
Gregory VII, Pope 35, 94
Grenada (Caribbean): Delaurence and 227
'Grimoire, The' (Summers) 268—9
Grimoire du Pape Honorius 34, 55, 92, 96, 97,
100, 107, 109, 114, 159, 165, 177,
245, 271
grimoires

ancient 7-16

definition 1

fictional 263

France 95-1 11

origins 6

owners 260

publication 98
Grosche, Eugen 250
Guadeloupe 159, 188
Guaita, Stanislas de 187; clef de la magie

noire, La 275
Guatemala 157
Guazzo, Francesco Maria 27
Guibourg, Etienne 92

358 | Index

Guillaume, Amaud 40
Guillery, Jean 106
Guzhdo, Sentinella 172
gypsies 120, 171

Hague, Thomas 198, 201
Haiti 161

Hale, Revdjohn 89

Ham (son of Noah) 8

Hambhn, William J. 149—50

Hammer of the Demons, The (Albertinus) 59

Handbuch der Astromagie 248

Hanish, Otoman Zar-Adusht 217

Harba de-Mosha (Sword of Moses) 1 1

Harry Potter 280

hashish 178

healers

Caribbean 165

Colombia 246

Mexico 243
Hebrew language 75—6 see also Kabbalah;
Torah

Heide, Ulrich Christian 126
Helmand de Froidmont 27
Henry the Bohemian 39
Heptameron (d'Abano) 38, 53, 69, 247
herbalists see botdnicas
heresy 43

Herman Barsdorf Verlag (publisher) 247
Herman's Book of Black Art Magic Made Easy

(Herrmann) 234
Hermann, Kid 206—7
Hermes Trismegistus 11— 12, 46
Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor 179
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn 182—5
Hermeticism 46
Herrera, Aurelio 206—7
Hess, Rudolf 250
Hess, Wilbert 207, 209
hex doctors: United States 206—7, 209—10
Hexen unter uns? (Kruse) 256, 260
hexenbanner see witch doctors: Germany
Heydon, John

Rosie Crucian infallible axiomata, The 88

Temple of Wisdom, The 139
Hieroglyphica 169
hieroglyphs 168

High Magic's Aid (Gardner) 270, 271
Himmler, Hemrich 250

Hindu magic 224, 225

Hindu Magic and Indian Occultism

(Delaurence) 225, 229
Hispamcs 242-7

History of Human Folly (Adelung) 1 18-19
History of Witchcraft and Demonology, The

(Summers) 269
Hitchcock, Eliakim 89
Hitler, Adolf 249
Hoar, Dorcas 89
Hockley, Frederick 177, 182
Hodgson, W. H. 263, 265
Hofmann, Mark 148

Hohman, John George 192-4; lang verborgene

Freund, Der 144
Holland, Frederick 179—80
Holy Death see Santtsima Muerte
Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple,

The 212
Homagius, Philipp 53
Honorius III, Pope 34
Honorius of Thebes 34

Grimoire du Tape Honorius 34, 55, 92, 96,
97, 100, 107, 109, 114, 159, 165,
177, 245, 271
Sworn Book of Honorius 34, 36, 42, 65
hoodoo 190-1, 214-15
Hopkins, Matthew 84
Horace 41

Horniman, Annie 180— 1
Homiman Museum (London) 180
horoscopes 141
Horst, Georg Conrad 122-3
Houssay , Julien-Ernest see Julio, Abbe
Howard, Robert E.: Unaussprechlichen

Kulten 264
Hufeland, Chnstoph Wilhelm 1 99
Huguenots see Calvinists
humanism 46
Humbug (Roback) 200
Huon of Bordeaux 6 1
Hyatt, Harry Middleton 214
hypnotism 216

Iceland 31, 71-2
Idris see Enoch
illiteracy 41-2, 82, 83
Illumination of Knowledge see Shams
al-ma'arif

Index | 359

Illustrated Key to the Tarot, Tire (Delaurence)

see Pictorial Key to the Tarot
Index of Prohibited Books 74, 109, 114
India 2, 3 see also Hindu magic; Hindu Magic

and Indian Occultism (Delaurence)
Indians: Jamaica 229
Infinite Wisdom 212
ink 18, 24

Inner Studies (Hamsh) 2 1 8
Inquisitions 42, 44

Brazil 85

France 68, 77

Italy 74, 76, 81; Venice 54-5, 76
Malta 76-7
Mexico 85, 87

Spain 54, 74, 76, 77, 81, 112, 113
see also torture
Internet 278, 281

Isabella the Catholic, Queen of Spain 28
Islam 76-7, 156, 166-7 see a l so Koran; Nation
of Islam

Italy

book trade 79

Inquisition 54-5, 74, 76, 81

see also Venice

Jackson, Revd Thomas 61
Jamaica 28-31, 241-2
James I and VI, King 68
Japhet (son of Noah) 8
Jaso, Andres 113
Jennings, Hargrave 177, 178
Jesuits 120

Jesus Christ 16-17, 3 1 sec a k° Aquarian Gospel
of Jesus Christ, The

Jews

Black 214

converses 74, 76

and magic 10, 29-3 1

marranos 113
John of Chrysostom, Saint 19
John the Conqueror root 238, 240
Johnson, Jack 218
Jonson, Ben 47, 60
Jonsson, Revd Arm 72
Josephus 12
Judaism: legislation 23
Julio, Abbe 185-7, 188

Julius Ciprianus den XII & DJ. Faustus
Dreyfaices Hollen Schwang' 123
Junior Philopatreias' see Rosenlund, Soren

Kabbalah 30-1, 46 see also Qabbalah Unveiled

(Mathers)
kalemaris charms 129, 131
Kallawaya (Bolivia) 246
Kamal, Ahmed Bey 172
Kardecism 157
Kay, Joe 234
Kelpius, Johannes 140
Kenyon, Frederick George 173, 174
Key of Solomon see Clavicula Salomonis
Kircher, Athanaseus: Oedipus Aegyptiacus 169
Kloster, Das 123, 248
Knights Templar 34
Koch, Kurt 259-61
Kohath, Bishop 230
Kokborg, Henrik 131
Koran 4

Kruse, Johann 254, 257, 258, 259
Kyranides 28-9, 57

La Maie, Helen 219

Lackington, James 134

Lalanne, Dominique 113

Lamarque, Anne 153

Lambert, Nicolas no

Lancre, Pierre de 73, 78, 79

lang verborgene Freund, Der (Hohman) 144, 192

Lanza, Father Cesare 54, 55, 82

Laveau, Marie 190— 1

LaVey, Anton Szandor 272—4

laws see legislation

Le Fevre, abbe 74, 96-7

Le Guin, Ursula: Wizard of Earthsea 280

Leas, Peter 207

leechbooks 22

Leeds, Daniel 143

Leeds, Titan 143

Legends of Incense, Herb and Oil Magic (de

Claremont) 240, 242
legislation

France 92

Germany 249, 253

Jamaica 229-30

Judaism 23

United States 201-2,218

360 | Index

legislation (cont.)

witchcraft 45

see also Canonical Law
Lehman, Christopher 141
Leiden rolls 173

Lenhart, Andrew C. 191, 206, 207
Lenormant, Francois: La Magie chez les

Chaldeennes 173, 183
Leo III, Pope 34-5 see also Enchiridion Leonis

Papa?

Lesage (magician) 128

Levi, Eliphas 175—7, 22 3

Levi, Isacco 76

Lewis, Charles D. 195

Liber centum 69

Liber Raziel see Book of Raziel

libraries

Alexandria 9

Austin Friars (York) 36

Bibliotheque de lArsenal (Paris) 97

central Europe 42

and clergy 62-3

colonial ecclesiastical 85

Dresden Royal Library 119, 120

Egypt 20, 172

Gardner, Gerald 271

Mexico 86

'Monsieur Oufle' 97

Moors 25

Royal Swedish Library 123
Ruiz Calderon, Pedro 87
subscription 141
Teackle, Thomas 88
Uruk 8

Winthrop, John, Jr 88
Library Company of Philadelphia 141, 143
Libro de San Cipriano (Book of St

Ciprian) 114— 17, 131, 243, 245, 246
Liebenfels, Jorg Lanz von 247
lille Udtog of Syprianus, En (A Little Piece of

Syprianus) 131
Lilly, William 61
Lind, Jenny 204
List, Guido von 247
literacy

African-Americans 239

Enlightenment 93, 98

and magic 5, 282

New England 90

Scandinavia 72
see also illiteracy
Little, Robert Wentworth 177
Little Book of the Toledo Caves see livret des

Caverne de Toledo
Little Piece of Cyprianus, A see lille Udtog af

Syprianus, En
Livre Caraibe 158

livre des grand exorcismes et benedictions,

Le Qulio) 188
livret des Caverne de Tolede 67
London 41

Long Hidden Friend, The 194

Long Lost Friend 191, 193, 196, 197, 206, 209,

210, 242
Long Secreted Friend, Tlie 192
Longo, Pietro 79
lotteries: America 144
Louis XIV, King 91, 92
Louisiana 154

love magic 39-40, 80, 81, 85
Lovecraft, Howard Phillips 263-7, 268
Lozano, Cristobal 27-8
Lucidarius (Albano) 38, 54
Lucidator 38

Luciferian Witchcraft (Ford) 277
Lucifuge Rofocale 101, 103
Luther, Martin 44, 50, 75
Luxembourg, Due de 91, 126, 128
Lyon (France) 122

Machen, Arthur 262
Mackenzie, Kenneth 177
Magi 7

Magia Adamica (Vaughan) 88

Magia Blanca, La 246

Magia Natural (Moorne) 245

Magia naturalis (Delia Porta) 57, 141, 258

Magia Negra, La 246

Magia Roja, La 246

Magia Suprema Negra, La (Moorne) 244, 245
magic

America 145

astral 25, 29, 30, 32 see also Picatrix
astrological 3
Enlightenment 95— ill
France 93-1 11
Graeco-Egyptian 9
'gypsy' 120

Index | 361

as heresy 43

Hindu 224, 225, 229

and literacy 282

literary 5, 61-7

love 39-40, 80, 81, 85

and medicine 164-5, 1 9 1 , 1 9 2 ~1^ 199-200,

213, 224, 282
natural 22
and necromancy 23
Neoplatonic 132
practical 39-43, 182, 187-9
and printing 45

and religion 2, 21—3, 32, 224—5, 22 6, 227
Renaissance 46

ritual see Hermetic Order of the Golden
Dawn

magic books 2 see also grimoires
Magic Key, The 230
magic mirrors 178
magic squares 3

Magic with Incense and Powders (Riva) 280
'Magica Natur' 88

magicians see Rucker, Benjamin (Black
Herman)
and necromancy 23
and print grimoires 5
prostitutes as 67
Renaissance 46—50
Magkk of Kirani King of Persia, The 57
Magie chez les Chaldeennes, La (Lenormant) 183
Magus, The: or Celestial Intelligencer

(Barrett) 135-6, 136, 137, 143, 149,
150, 178, 179, 216—17
Malipiero, Laura 81—2
Malleus Mallificarum 97
Malta 76

Mami Wata worship (Nigeria) 224-5
Man, Know Thyself (Davidson) 185
Manbrok see Membrock
mandrake root 22
Manetho 12

Mangialoca, Benvenuta 41
Manley, Michael Norman 230—1
Manley, Norman Washington 229
Mann Act (United States) 218
Manuel, Don Juan 27
Mapp, Rupert 162—3
marabouts 167
Marburg (Germany) 53

Maria de Medina 80-1
Markiewicz, Feliks 213
marranos (converted Jews) 1 1 3
Martha, Saint 80-1
Martinique 158, 160
Mascarene Islands 163—4
Maspero, Gaston 172, 174
Mass: and magic 32
Massey, Gerald 175

Master Book of Candle Burning (Gamache) 241
Master Key 230

Master Key to Occult Secrets (Gamache) 241
Masters of Magic: general council of 34
Mathers, Samuel Liddell 179-81, 182, 183,

185, 187, 217
Matthews, Rabbi Wentworth Arthur 214
Mauritius 163—4

Max Wendels Verlag (publisher) 248

Mayer, Martin 246

Mayer, Peter 273, 274

Mazdaznans 217, 247

Medecin des pauvres 107

medicine: and magic 164-5, 1 9 1 , 1 9 2 ~1^

199-200, 213, 224, 282
Membrock (spirit) 96—7, 100
Mende tribe (Sierra Leone) 166
Mendez, Cristobal 85
Menetra, Jacques-Louis 107
Menghi, Girolamo 59
mental illness 261
Menuisier, Jean Michel 64—5
mercenaries 124
Mercurii (secret society) 138
Mexico 85, 86-7, 243, 246
Michael Scot's Magic Book 37
Middle East: influence on Europe 6
Millet, Ponce 99
Mirandola, Pico della 46
Modena (Italy) 81

Modern Witchcraft Spellbook (Riva) 279

Mog Ruith 16

monasteries 36

monks 36, 41

Montalto, Philothee 75

Montespan, Madame de 91

Montoute, Edmond 162-3

Moorish Science Temple 211, 212

Moorne, Dr: La Magia Suprema Negra 244, 245

Moors 25, 26, 79, 114, 116 see also moriscos

362 | Index

Mora, Giovanni Giacomo 56
Mora, Pierre (Piero) 56
Moreau, Etienne 65
Morie, Moyse 1 1 1

moriscos 76 see also Espinel, Jerommo
Mormons 147—52
Morosoni, Giulio 54
Morrison, Richard James 178
Moryson, Fynnes 119

Moses 9— 11, 212; books of 248, 261 see also

Eighth Book of Moses;
Mystery of the 8th, gth and 10th Books of

Moses (Gamache);
Seventh Book of Moses; Sixth Book of Moses
Mueller, Paul Alfred 253
mummies, Egyptian 168, 171
Murray, Margaret: The Witch-Cult in Western

Europe 265, 270
Musallam, Dr see Sattler, Franz
Muslim slaves 76—7
Muth, Konrad 50
Mysteries of Magic 223

Mystery of the 8th, gth and 10th Books of Moses
(Gamache) 241, 271

Napier, John 3 5

Napoleon Bonaparte 170

Napoleon Bonaparte's Book of Fate 171

Nation of Islam 211

'natural evil' 23 1

Natural History (Pliny the Elder) 25
natural magic 22

Natural Magic (Delia Porta) see Magia naturalis

(Delia Porta)
Navarra, Michele 52
Nazare, Luis de 60
Nazism 120, 249-52
necromancy 22, 23
Peru 86

Sefer ha-Razim (Book of Mysteries) 29—30

Toledo (Spain) 27-8
Necromantia 37
Necronomicon 264—7
Neoplatonic magic 132
Nevis island 227

New and Complete Illustration of the Celestial
Science of Astrology,
77»e(Sibly) 134, 143, 149, 150
New England 83, 88-90

New York Black Israelites 214
New York Society Library 143
Newbold, William 268
Newell, William W. 16 1-2
newspapers: United States 189, 200-1,

212-13, 239
Nigeria: Delaurence and 224—5
Nightmare Alley (Gresham) 273
Ninth Gate, The (film) 281-2
Nirwana-Verlag fur Lebensreform

(publisher) 248
Nisard, Charles 104
Noah 7

no'minas (prayers) 45
Norway 123, 126

Norwegian literature: United States 205
Norwich, Bishop of (d. 11 19) 8
Notary Arts (Solomon) see Ars Notoria
Numbers Racket (New York) 240
nuns 73

oaths: Puritan era 84

Obeah 156, 159-60, 165, 185, 228, 229

Oberon, king of the fames 60—1

obscurantism 94—5

occult: Third Reich and 249-5 1

Occult Philosophy (Agnppa) 66

Occult Products Company 240

Occult Revival 174-85

Oeuvres magiques d'Henri Corneille Agrippa 101

Of the supreme mysteries of nature 48

Old Man of the Pyramids, The 1 7 1

Oldtidens Sortehog (Anderson) 205

One Hundred Kings see Centum Regnum

Order of the Black Rose 217, 218, 219

Order of the White Willow 217

Ordo Novi Templi 247

Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) 247

Oriental Esoteric Library (W ashington

DC) 220
Orisha (spirit religion) 3-4
Oshitelu, Josiah Olunowo 225
Osthanes 7

pacts

Scandinavia 124, 125, 126

witches 82-83
paganism, fall of 21
pagans see Wicca religion

Index | 363

palindromes see SATOR AREPO

word square
Panayno, Antonio 54
papal bulls 74
paper 23 see also papyrus
Papus 187
papyri

Egyptian 172, 173, 183

Graeco-Egyptian 9, 10

magic 173-4

Mosaic 10— 11

Testament of Solomon 12
papyrus 18, 23

Papyrus of Ani see Book of the Dead (Budge)

Paracelsus 48—9, 176

parchment 23—4

Parkins, John 135, 137

Patersoune, Bartie 70-1

peddlers see colporteurs

Pedro, Dom 79

Pentateuch see Torah

Peranda, Stefano 55

Perez de Soto, Melchior 86

Perez-Reverte, Arturo: The Club Dumas 281-2

Persia 7

Peru 85-6, 87-8

Petit Albert 97, 98-100, 99, 107, 109, 111,

113, 134, 153, 159, 161, 163, 164, 176
see also Vertable Petit Albert, he
Peuckert, Will-Erich 257—9
Peynado, Wilbert 230
Philipps, Rowland 44
Philippus Attinius onorius 65
Philosophical Merlin, The (Smith) 137
Philosophy of Human Nature, The 200
Picatrix (The Aim of the Sage) 26-7, 40, 55, 63,

94, 266
Picot, Virgile 164

Pictorial History of Magic and the Supernatural 275
Pictorial Key to the Tarot (Waite and Smith) 223
Piemontese, Alessio 57
Pistorius, Johan 129
Pitman, Frank Wesley 160— 1
Planet- Verlag (publisher) 253-4, 2 5<5> 2 57>
258, 261

Plato 8

Plmy the Elder 7; Natural History 25
Poisons, Affair of the (France) 91, 92

police

Chicago 210
Paris 95

Poor Richard' s Almanack (Franklin) 143
see also Gatnle Richards Swartkonst-bok

popes 34-6, 43

Portugal 88, 117

poule noire, La 106, 159, 171

powwow 191, 195, 207

Pow-Wows: Or, The hong-host Friend 233

Powers of the Psalms (Riva) 279, 280

Practica of Exorcists 59

Practical Magic (film) 280

Practicas magicae 37

'Practice of Dammell' 63

prayers

Enchiridion heonis Papa; 101
Julio, Abbe 186

Prieres Merveilleuses pour la guerison de toutes
les Malades
Phisiques et Morales 188

printed 45

profane use of 80

St Christopher Prayer 120
priests see clergy
printing 44

America 88, 141, 143, 213, 232-3

and grimoire tradition 53—4

and literary magic 5

Spain 77

see also publishing industry
Priscillian of Avila 21
Prokop, Otto 253, 256-7, 258
Prophetesses and Cyprianus' Big Dream Book 127
prostitutes 41, 67, 80-1
Protestants 44-5, 53, 59, 77-8
Protestation Oath (1641) 84
Prussia 121—2

psalms 240 see also Shimush Tehilim; 'vertus
admirables des Psaumes de David, les'
Pseudomonarchia 69-70
Ptolomaeus Graeccus see Toz Graecus
Ptolomy 24
publishing industry
Britain 132-8
Europe 94-5
France 98
Geneva no

364 I Index

publishing industry (cont.)

Germany 247-8, 250, 252, 253, 261
Spain 79, 243-5
South America 245-7
United States 214, 216
see also book trade; printing
Puerto Ricans 242
Putumayo (Colombia) 246
Pythagoras 8

Qabbalah Unveiled (Mathers) 180
Quebec 152-5

Queen Mab see Mab, queen of the fairies
Quinn, Michael: Early Mormonism and the
Magic World View 148-50, 152

Rabellina, Rabbi 119

Rainsford, Charles R. 94

Randolph, Beverly 177-8

Raphael see Smith, Robert Cross

Rastafananism 228

Rastell, John 45

recetarios 165

Recordi, Pierre 40

Reformation 44, 46, 62

Reger, Christopher 121

Regulus Verlag (publishers) 250

Rehmeyer, Nelson D. 207, 209

religion: and magic 2, 21—3, 140, 32, 224—5,

226, 227, 282
religious traditions: Americas 155-7
Remy, Nicolas 67
Renaissance 46—50
Rendel Harris, J. 174
Rendon, Alberto 242—3
Reuchlin, Johannes 46
Reunion Island 163
Reuther, Joseph 121
Reuvens, Caspar Jacob Christiaan 173
Reynie, Nicolas de la 91, 92
Richardson, James 60
Risco, Vicente 116
Riva, Anna 279, 280
Rivail, Hippolyte Leon 157
Roback, Charles W. 171-2, 197-205, 203
Rocheblanche, Le Valet de 96
Rodriguez Island 163, 164
Roman, Robert 139

Romanusbuchlein (Germany) 120, 123, 248

Rosa, Diego de la 86, 87-8
Rosemary's Baby (Levin) 273-4
Rosenberg, Alfred 251
Rosenkreuz, Christian 47
Rosenlund, Soren 129
Rosetta Stone 170
Rosicruciamsm 47, 178, 248
Rosie Crucian infallible axiomata, The

Hey don) 88
Roumain, Jacques 158—9
Rucker, Benjamin 234, 236, 237
Ruiz Calderon, Pedro 87
runes 31-2, 129, 130, 249
Russel, Chloe 190

Saami 72

Sabellicus, Georgius 50

Sacred Book of Death, The (Delaurence) 2 1 6

sacrifices 15, 26, 160; human 162-3
Saducistnus Triumphatus (Glanvill) 265
St Augustine's Abbey, Canterbury 36
St Christopher Prayer 120, 123, 147
Saint-Etienne, Aubert de 96
St John, Sir Spenser 161
St Lucia (island) 1 62—3
Sala, Joseph 64
Salamanca (Spain) 28
Salmaro, Nicodemo 54
Salomonis Lemegethan 65
San Francisco Mercatile Library 143
Sanchez, Miguel 78
Sanctuary of the Astral Art (Raphael) 143
Sanctum Regnum seu Pneumatologia Salomonis 110
Santisima Muerte (Holy Death) 246—7
Saragossa (Spain) 76, 77-8
Sarmiento, Pedro 85-6
Satanic Bible 272, 274-7
Satanic Rituals (LaVey) 277
SATOR AREPO word square 13, 31, 71
Sattler, Franz 248
Saunders, Richard: Physiognomy and

Chiromancy 140
Scandinavia 3 1—2 see also Denmark; Iceland;

Norway; Sweden
Schafer, Herbert 254, 259

Scheible, Johann 123, 126; Das Kloster 206
Schmidt, Philipp 254, 258, 259
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures
(Eddy) 243

Index | 365

Scot, Michael 37
Scot, Reginald 69—70, 119, 132
Seabrook, William: Voodoo, The Magic
Island 159

secret societies see Freemasonry; Mercurii

Secret! (Piemontese) 57, 86

secrets of Albert {experiments of Albert) 38—9

Secrets of Magic-Mystery 236, 238

Secrets of Magical Seals (Riva) 279

'secrets of secrets' 56—7, 70

Secrets of the Psalms, Tire 233, 240, 241, 242

see also Sefer Shimush Tehilim
Secretum secretorum (Aristotle) 24
Seelig, Johann Gottfried see Sehlee, Johann
Gottfried

Sefer ha-Razim (Book of Mysteries) 29—30

Sefer Shimush Tehilim 141, 233

Sehlee, Johann Gottfried 140-1

Selig, Godfrey: Secrets of the Psalms, The 141

Sempe, Jean: Prieres Merveilleuses pour la guerison

de toutes les
Malades phisiques et Morales 188
Sennevoy, Jean Du Potet de 176-7
Seven Keys to Power, The (de Claremont) 241,

242, 271, 280
Seven Steps to Power, The (de Claremont) 241,

242

Seventh Book of Moses 11, 118, 119, 123, 147,

152, 185, 206—7, 2 °8, 2I 3> 2I 4> 2I( 5, 224,
225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 233, 239,
240, 242, 248, 249, 250, 253-4, 2 55, 2 5°>
257, 258, 260-1, 266, 275, 277, 279

Severus (Spanish priest) 21

Seville (Spain): and printing 45

sex: and magic 34—5, 42

Shakespeare, William see Mab, queen of the
fairies; Oberon, king of the fairies

shamamc cultures: Scandinavia 72

Shams al-ma'arif (Al-Buni) 27, 166

Shem (son of Noah) 7, 8

Shenoute, abbot 20

shepherds 65-6

Sibly, Ebenezer 134

Sibly, Manoah 134-5

Sierra Leone 166

Sigil of Baphomet 275, 276

Sigsand manuscript 263

Silver Raven "Wolf: Solitary Witch 281

Silvester II, Pope 35

Simon Magus 15—16
Simoman Gnostics 16
Sinclair, Upton 211, 213
Sinot, Patrick 64

Sixth Book of Moses 11, 118, 119, 123, 147, 152,
185, 206-7, 2 °8, 2I 4> 2I( 5> 22 4> 22 5> 22( >>
227, 228, 229, 230, 233, 235, 239, 240,
242, 248, 249, 250, 253-4, 2 55, 2 5(h 2 57,
258, 260-1, 266, 275, 277, 279

slaves 76-7, 114

Smagorad 40

Smith, Clark Ashton: The Book of Eibon 264

Smith, Joseph 147-8, 149

Smith, Robert Cross 137-8

Societas Rosicruciana 177

Solemn League and Covenant (1644) 84

Soler,Juan 76, 112

Solomon, King 12-15 see also Book of the Key of
Solomon; Clavicula Salomonis; Salomonis
Lemegethan; Testament of Solomon;
Zecorbeni seu clavicula Salomonis

Sonnim, Charles S.: Travels in Upper and Lower
Egypt 171

sorcerers 159, 163-4 see also faux sorciers; Obeah
South America see Brazil; Buenos Aires;
Colombia; Guatemala;

Kallawaya (Bolivia); Putumayo (Colombia)
Spam 21, 25—8

inquistion 77-8

printing trade 45

treasure hunting 1 16-17

see also Moors
Spamer, Adolf 251—2
Spanish Road 78
Spaun, Claus 40

Spellcraft, Hexcraft and Witchcraft (Riva) 279
spells

Black Herman 238

Eighth Book of Moses 10— 11

Julio, Abbe 188

knotting of the cord 72-3

leechbooks 22

Roman 23
Spencer, Dorothy see Riva, Anna
spirit religions see Orisha
spirits see Lucifuge Rofocale; Trinum perfectum

magice alba? et nigrce
spiritualism 1 74—5
Spiritualist Baptists (Jamaica) 227

366 | Index

Spitalnick, Joseph W. see Kay, Joe
Spokesman, The (magazine) 236
Sprengel, Anna 182
Stadera, Bemardina 41

Stafford-Jemmgham, Fitzherbert Edward 181
Stapleton, William 37, 60
Steganographia (Trithemius) 47, 53
Stokes, Henry 220

Straggling Astrologer, The (periodical) 137

Sufurino, Jonas 33,245

suicides 138

Sulzer, Simon 53

Sumatra see Batak

Summers, Montague 28, 56; 'The

Grimoire' 268—9
superstition see German Society for Protection

against Superstition
Surya, G. W. 248

'Svarteboken, dealing with witchcraft'

(Anderson) 205
Svartkonstboken (Sweden) 131
Sweden 123, 124
Swedenborg, Emanuel 134
Switzerland: treasure hunting 112 see also

Geneva

Sworn Book ofHonorius 34, 36, 42, 65

Sybrianus P. P. P. 129

symbols, occult see Sigil of Baphomet

teiifelsbucher (Devil's books) 50
talismans 26, 145
Tarot cards 169, 245
Tarragona (Spain) 21
Taussig, Michael 245—6
Taxil, Leon 187
Teackle, Thomas 88
Teed, Cyrus 211
teenagers 280—1
Tegg, Thomas 137
television 280—1

'Temple of Muses' (London) 134

Temponi, Domenico 76

Ten Lost Books of the Prophets, The 241

Terrors of the Evil Eye Exposed (Gamache) 271

Testament of Solomon 12-14

Tetragrammaton 31

Theban Magical Library 183

Thebes (Egypt) 171, 172—3

Theodore of Galatia, Saint 20

Theosophy 175, 247

Tliesaurus Spirituum 37

Thompson, E. P. 134

Thomdike, Lynn 268

Thoth see Toz Graecus

Three Books of Occult Philosophy see De occulta

philosophia (Agrippa)
Toe see Toz Graecus
Toledo (Spain) 26, 27-8, 65

Council of see Council of Toledo
Torah (Pentateuch) 10, 29
torture 41 see also Inquisitions
Toulouse (France): book trade 77
Toz Graecus 11, 12, 97

Traite methodique de magie pratique (Papus) 187—9
treasure hunting 39, 82

America 145-8

Egypt 172

France 100— 1, 106, 108, 113, 114— 15
Germany 120, 146
Peru 87-8
Quebec 154

Spain in, 112, 114, 115— 17

Switzerland 112

Venice 54-5
Treasure of Treasures (Villanova) 87
Treatise of Shem 7

Trent, Council of see Council of Trent

Trianon, Catherine 92

Trinidad: Delaurence and 227-3 1

Trinum perfectum magice albce et nigrce 1 19-20, 123

Trithemius, Johannes 17, 37, 47, 49, 69, 176

Truthful Jesuit's Very Highest Infernal Command,

The 120
Tryon, Thomas 66
Tuck, Thomas 89
Turell, Revd Ebenezer 144
Turner, Robert 52, 132

Ulfkjasr, Anders: Cyprianus 130
Umbanda religion (Brazil) 245
Unaussprechlichen Kulten (Howard) 264
Underhill, Evelyn: The Column of Dust 262—3
Undesirable Publications Law (Jamaica) 229-30
United States 189-231 see also America;

Louisiana; New England
Universal Fortune-Teller (Parkins) 137
universities 36
Uruk 8

Index | 367

Valle-Inclan, Ramon del 116
Vaughan, Thomas: Magia Adamica 88
Venice

book trade 79

censorship 74

cunning-women 81—2

Inquisition 54-5, 76

Jews 76

talismans 67

treasure hunting 54—5
Verger, Jean-Louis 1 77
Veritable Petit Albert, Le (Duquet) 154
veritables clavicules de Salomon, les 101, 102, 113
veritables pentacles etpriers, Les (Julio) 188
'vertus admirables des Psaumes de David, les' 96
Vicente, Joan 77—8
Vigoureux, Marie 92
Villanova, Arnold de 87
Virgil 24

Virtutes Herbarum see Grand Albert
Voodoo 156, 1 60-1, 162, 190-1
Voodoo Handbook of Cult Secrets (Riva) 280
Vow and Covenant (1643) 84
Voynich, Wilfred Michael 267-8

wahrhafien Jesuiten allerhochsten Hotlenzwang,
Der 120

wahrhaftige feurige Drache, Der 248

Waite, Arthur Edward 181-2, 183, 223, 271

Waldstein, Count 94

Weakley, Leonard 229

Weatherly, Ulysses G. 160

Weiss, Johann 59

Wessely, Carl 173

Westcott, William Wynne 177, 182

Weyer, Johann 69

Whidden, B. F. 162

White Shriners 211

White Slave Traffic Act see Mann Act (United
States)

Wicca religion 270, 272, 279
Wiligut, Karl-Maria 249
William of Auvergne 36
William of Malmesbury 3 5
Williams, Michael D. 219
Wimbum see Cameroon
Windward Islands 160, 227
Winthrop, John, Jr 88

Wisdom, Gregory 63
witch books 158

witch doctors: Germany 252, 254, 256, 259

see also hex doctors
witch-finders see Hopkins, Matthew
witch hunters see Remy, Nicolas
witch hunts 43
'witch priests' 73
witch trials

Enlightenment 93

Europe 70—3
France 9 1
Germany 250

New England 90
witchcraft 16, 45, 91—2

Germany 249, 252, 254, 261

United States 89, 242

see also Wicca religion
Witchcraft and Black Magic (Summers) 269
Witchcraft Detected and Prevented 134
Witchcraft Today (Gardner) 270
witches 15-16, 82-4, 279

France 78

good and bad 45

Spain 78—9, 145

teenage 280-1
Witches Among Us? (Kruse) 256, 260
Witt, Christopher 141
Wittenberg (Germany) 119,128-9
women

and illiteracy 83

influence of 279-80

and literary magic 41-2, 81

and medicine 66

and witch hunts 43, 45

and witchcraft 82-4
Woodford, A. F. A. 182
word squares 13, 31, 71
Wormius, Olaus 265, 266
Wright, Walter Charleton 138
writing 2-5, 8, 9 see also hieroglyphs; runes
Wunderlich, Karl 119

Yahvah Little Flock Assembly, Mystic Centre

(Jamaica) 230
Yeats, W. B. 182
Yllan, don 27

Young, Mr (aka de Claremont, Lewis) 240

368 | Index

Zabulon (prince) 24

Zacariah of Mytilene 20

Zauber Teuffel, Der (The Devil of Magic) 50

Zauberbibel see Bible of Magic (Musallam)

Zecorbeni seu davicula Salomonis 55-6, 94

Zentralblatt fur Okkultismus (magazine) 248
Zimmerman, Johann 140
Zimmermann, Georg 53
Zoroaster 7, 8
Zorzi (monk) 59—60